Alex Alman

Role - UX/UI Designer

Personal Project: -Spaces

Type - Personal Project

Project Introduction

When I was an architecture student in NYC, I’ve always loved to explore spaces and buildings with my friends and classmates. I noticed that there are tons of interesting building designed by the most renowned architects and designers all around us but there’s no way of knowing where to look. I want to create an app that would help connect the interesting hidden architectural projects with people.

Initial Hypothesis

• People visit cities to discover architecture specifically

• Architecture enthusiasts and/or architects are the target users for architecture tour apps

• Users would rather follow a guided tour instead of creating one on their own

• Users have used a architecture/tour guide app before

• People like using tour guide apps instead of having a real person guide them

Interview findings

All users, despite having a background in architecture were interested in learning about architecture. However, users with the background in architecture cared more about the holistic details on buildings as well as visiting cities for the sole purpose of discovering architecture. The architects/architectural designers would be the target users.

Learning About Architecture

Learning random facts about buildings would be interesting. Topics such as water features, front facade and interesting hierarchy elements.

Discovering Architecture

All users liked the idea of discovering new and hidden gems of architecture. Being in the city so long and there’s information that’s not there. Users want to find buildings and have a deeper wealth of information on it. People have blogs on certain topics within the architecture community but there’s not that much information in them.

Traveling and Tours

Architectural users typically have an idea of what to do when visiting city. The experience is both planned and organic. Sometimes they like to go placed based on what draws them. If there’s an interesting museum or market, they will just walk there.

Target users

I interviewed three different users based on their traits. The target users were architecture designers, architecture enthusiasts and casual travelers.

User Stories

The MVP

The MVP for this application is discovering architectural projects via a map with a curated list of projects. User can search for projects or filter their search down to narrow their results down to the architect’s name. The app will display the metadata such as: project name, type, architect name, year, description and photos. The list of architecture will come from a curated list based on existing architectural site, blogs and google maps.

Design Definition

The wireframes help During this phase, I explored screen layout, iterated on UI design patterns, defined the mood board and the style guide. overall layout and define functionality based on our user stories

Wireframes

Creating wireframes as the first attempt towards designing based on user feedback and must haves. I used the crazy-8 method to explore the layouts and UI design against key features.

Mood Board

This mood board aimed to reflect a clean, professionally design application that used a mood setting photographs and vibrant iconography.

Styleguide

Key Features

The final mockups aimed to make discovery of architecture easy and interesting. The design purposefully was clean and simple in order to reduce cognitive load.

All Screens