I survived my first project!

I'm in week 3 of my class, which means I've already completed my first project and am currently working on wrapping up my second.

One of the first things we learned about was affinity mapping. At first glance it seems like a fun excuse to throw a bunch of sticky notes in fun colors at the wall. But it's so much more than that.

Affinity mapping is basically a way to take the insights you've gained from doing your research and organize it so you can notice any trends taking place. Then you use those trends to help you discover what issue you're going to work to solve with your design.

Our first project was to design an app for one of our classmates, so we had to do interviews to gather information then use affinity mapping as a tool to organize that info.

I used my affinity map to determine what the key features of my app would be. On the right you can see my affinity mapping in its entirety.

A cool thing you can do after you've done your physical affinity mapping is to digitize it using a tool such as Miro. Here's a snapshot of mine to the right.

FYI: writing out all those sticky notes and putting them on the wall is a lot more work than you'd think. Just wanna throw that out there.

After affinity mapping, it was time to start sketching. This might have been my favorite part of the process. It was cool to go from a blank piece of paper to actually having a concept that I could actually draw out.

I sketched my idea out on paper first, and then used notecards to create my first paper prototype. After creating my first prototype came the humbling part... handing it over to someone else to actually try it out.

Of course, I discovered issues I didn't foresee. But then I got to focus on re-designing to address those issues. Here's my "final" paper prototype I ended up with for the sake of this project.

It's a budgeting app that keeps up with your spending on your daily grocery shopping and helps you stay on track financially. It also lets you add items to your shopping list from recipes suggested by the app.

You can check out a click-through of the app here: https://marvelapp.com/49hgj1a

We also had to present our project to the class and we had five minutes to do so. FIVE MINUTES. But I got it done.

With project 1 under my belt, I'm focused on finishing project 2 and presenting next week. Wish me luck!