Dexter application
We had 48 hours to sketch, design, animate, and prototype a fully functional application. Needless to say we slept very little, we wanted to win. Among 9 universities and 20 other teams across the country, we came out as finalists and went on to present our final prototype to Adobe live.
The task at hand
Let’s be honest, adopting or even getting a dog is a big deal but it can be a very lengthy and a painful process. Instead of having to do all this manually, processes that usually take 1-2 months, we wanted to bring this experience online. We wanted to make the process more fun, engaging, and we wanted to make it informative all in one place. We also wanted to connect the users directly with the adoption center so it can be done from the comfort of your home. This is the future and I think it’s time we helped our communities convert this process to a fun and engaging platform online.
Challenge
To keep a user interested and engaged long enough for them to take action to adopt a dog.
Solution
Introduced fun and interactive experiences from page to page which would help retain users in the application.
Functionalities such as sharing and liking were also introduced so users can easily access their favorite pups and share them with family and friends.
The share functionality would act as a self advertising feature that would increase the overall amount of users in the application overtime.
Classroom boards are underrated
It’s tough specially when starting a new product so we decided to try and articulate all our thoughts and ideas on a board before we started. We easily spent about 1/3 of our time doing research and writing ideas on the board.
Going with the flow
We obviously want to keep the user flow as simple as possible, fewest clicks to get to the end goal. In this case the end goal is to message the shelter showing your interest. Along the way, the users have options to ‘like’ dogs, adding them to their liked list which is easily accessible. Users can also share the dogs profile with their family and friends which we hoped would increase the likeliness of an individual getting enough support to finally adopt that puppy they always wanted.
As low as fidelity wireframes come
These are initial brainstorm sketches of the user interface. Just a way to put all my thoughts down on paper. Not the prettiest but very helpful to place things in position visually.
Do more with less
We narrowed down our type styles and colors to the very bare minimum. By using a very small style guide, it was much easier to make the app look cohesive and consistent.
Final Product
The Takeaway
48 hours between staying up and sleeping is a very short amount of time to finish a full application. The one thing to takeaway from this project was task allocation. Not everyone will be working on designing the actual UI. We needed someone to write copy, someone to design the layouts, someone to animate. Being that we all wanted to design the UI, it was a hard sell to tell someone to write copy but I think it took a level of understanding to see that for the product to be as good as it needs to, we need to be able to work as a team and focus on different tasks. We were all smart individuals and we took this step to divide up tasks towards the last 1/3 stretch of the project which proved to be much more efficient and collaborative.
The Dexter Team
This was a team effort all the way around. Aside from ideation, sketching, and designing the layouts for the UI, I was mostly in charge of creating custom animations from page to page. Animation was definitely one of the most important aspects we wanted to focus on because making an app interactive meant better engagement from our users.
Teammates: Eli Walters, Taylor Becknall
Bonus content
This is what our native file looked like before Adobe released ‘states’ for buttons. We were required to create a minimum of 10 artboards for the contest, we had well over a 100.
I guess we’re a bit much.