Contextual Statement

Singularity is the word that my project is based on, a world where information is at our fingertips
whenever anyone desires it. My project for this semester was mainly focused around research, with
a little experimentation thrown in. With the thought of singularity in mind, I thought about an app
that would give you information at your fingertips in a scene where you wouldnt expect this
information, the wilderness.

Designing this app lead me into a path of research. I wanted to think about different aspects of my
app and how I could design them with the user in mind. I first stumbled upon a research paper,
created by google (Gove, 2016). Googles aim was to see what made a good app. Google took 103
participants across the United States, and had them use a variety of different apps for around 90
minutes. They excluded gaming apps, as they thought this area of apps would have different
principles and would weaken their findings. Each participant would explain what they found
pleasing, and what they didnt like about the apps they were using. From this, Google create 25
principles of mobile app design.

A TED talk by John Maeda also was useful during the research for my project. Maeda talks about
designing for simplicity (Maeda, 2007). He tells a story about his vacation, and how simplicity
followed him around everywhere, from clothes shops and websites, to signs on the side of the road.
He later summarises simplicity by saying Simplicity is about living life with more enjoyment and less
pain.

Both the Google research and the TED talk led me to think about how my project could possibly be
designed, what the functions should be and how a user would use the app and how the user would
feel when using the app. How could the app give them as much information and functions as they
want, without the pain of cluttering the screen, or having something that doesnt work.

While thinking about the design of an app, my project aimed to consider physiology, in terms of how
phones connect to us, how we function with them. Steven Hoober wrote an article (Hoober, 2013)
about how people hold their mobile phones in their hands. The data he got was not specific to
anything, apart from the way they held their device, as this was just him observing from the public
and didnt have any interaction with the people. However, the data he collected was interesting.
33% of one handed users were holding it in their left hand, but only 10% of the population are left
handed. He also showed that there are many ways to hold your phone. In relation to my project, the
users would be holding their phones both portrait and landscape, so the app would have to factor
that in.

Other apps that have been created that are like my project were of great beneficial use, seeing what
functions they had, what they offered to the user, and how they offered it. 3 apps were found to
have different functions to each other but similar in ways to my project, these were AllTrails
(AllTrails, 2017), MapMyWalk (mapmywalk, 2017), and WalkLogger (WalkLogger, 2017). These apps
were taken out and tested in the field on various walks, looking at what they did, and how easy they
were to use. This helped in understanding how my project could design the UX, knowing what to
include, but more importantly, what to exclude, such as calorie counting.
References

(2017, May 18). Retrieved from AllTrails: https://www.alltrails.com/

(2017, May 18). Retrieved from mapmywalk: http://www.mapmywalk.com/nz/

(2017, May 18). Retrieved from WalkLogger: http://walklogger.com/

Gove, J. (2016, March). Principles of Mobile App Design: Introduction. Retrieved from think with
Google: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/experience-
design/principles-of-mobile-app-design-introduction/

Hoober, S. (2013, February 18). How Do Users Really Hold Mobile Devices? Retrieved from
UXmatters: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2013/02/how-do-users-really-hold-
mobile-devices.php

Maeda, J. (2007, March). Designing for simplicity. Retrieved from TED:

https://www.ted.com/talks/john_maeda_on_the_simple_life#t-799266