What Is City Guide?
City Guide is the result of a team based assignment. The brief was to work with the Christchurch City Council and develop an app that encourages teenagers and young families to explore Christchurch and utilize the facilities within Christchurch.
The app needed a way to entice people to keep using it and reward those who share the app with friends.
This project was made with Figma, Photoshop and Illustrator for the visual design, as building the app was not required, only the design process.
Early Concepts
The point of this project was to help us practice the fundamental design principles of CRAP (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity), along with sorting out and managing a time plan for the project and divvying up the work load and assigning a team lead.
Team lead was chosen by our tutor (having lead another project it wasn’t me). Once the team lead had been chosen we started by creating a timeline of milestones to achieve either before or on a certain date. The tasks to achieve these milestones were divvied up between four members of our team.
Research
To start, we brainstormed base ideas about what we wanted the app to do and how it would cater to the target audience. Once we had some ideas we thought would work we then came up with some personas. These are made up people who reflect primary, secondary target audiences and a third persona is created for users outside the target.
Name: Caleb Johnstone
Age: 17 y/o
Location: Central Christchurch
Occupation: High school student
Characteristics: Adventurous, energetic,
keen to try new things,
Hobbies: Skateboarding, photography
& chilling out with mates
Name: Emily Watson
Age: 23 y/o
Location: Cashmere, Christchurch
Occupation: Part-time retail assistant,
part-time journalism student
Characteristics: Outgoing, motivated,
ambitious, determined
Hobbies/Interests: Exercising (particularly
walking and jogging), shopping, nature
Once we had our personas we removed the previous ideas we had that we thought would not work for our target audience. We then compared our ideas with other existing event finders and launched an online survey for friends and family, asking what their thoughts were about the their experience in accessing information about recreational options around Christchurch.
Color Pallet
Concepts & How It Works
We broke off individually and came up with our own wire frames and then worked together to pull the best elements from each one and combine them. We then up scaled the wire frames to a higher fidelity concept.
Starting from the left to right, the user opens the app to see a log in. Once signed up and logged in the next three slides explain how the app works. First with a greeting and a language selection, followed by an explanation as to what you can expect from the app and a break down of the reward system. Finally, the user is asked to select what their interests may be so the app may suggest events or activities the user may enjoy.
The user is then brought to the home page where they are then free to explore the app and see which events are weather dependent, adjust profile information or find other popular locations.
Icons
Art Design.
My responsibility given by the team lead was to come up with the artistic direction of the app. We had made a concept and had some user feed back about the app which I used for decision making.
People felt that our overall goal of creating an app to help explore Christchurch was easy to understand and mapped out easily enough but felt more clinical than fun because of the color palette we used was directly from the councils website, which are a little mundane.
I opted to change the color palette to a more vibrant one, keeping the blues and greens and changing the vibrancy of the two. I also swapped out the black for purple and to contrast them used the white as a background color.
My idea for the Art style was to create a low detail representation of youths Using the City Guide. I used a stencil design for the characters as the low detail made it easy for the team to copy if needed, with relatively little time and effort to make more.
I also used line art for the facilities and land marks within Christchurch with a white stroke to contrast against the new color palette but with detail so they are still recognizable.
Development
Art Style
After discussing with the team about the new colors and art direction we reached an agreement that since we had a lot of existing work done already that we would edit the existing work to suit the new color scheme instead of double handling. While this was an effective time saver, I believe this removed some of the consistency toward the end of the project.
Consistency
