Conversation Research & Development

Rebekah Hollins

Conversation Research & Development

For this project we were required to put across a message to our desired audience, this message had to be something we believed to be of importance to the viewers.

I decided that the most important conversation in my opinion was health and fitness, and that it was important to enjoy fitness as part of our lives as much as possible. I wanted to create something that would not only help the viewer to see progress physically but also mentally, so that they were able to feel better about themselves.

My initial idea was to create a seriess of infographics that represented the shocking increase in obecity in the past few years, however nobody wants to look at a bunch of statistics and then feel inspired to go for a run straight after. I needed something that involved the user and motivated them to go out and experience fitness and then feel proud of what they have achieved.

I decided to aim the project towards an audience of the younger generation, from around 16-35 year olds. I think that this age group of people are still learning and if we can educate them about the importance of looking after our bodies then this will be taught on through future generations and hopefully the message will spread.

The designs will be aimed towards both a male and female audience, or anyone who is likely to feel most pressure to adhere to the expectations of society. I am hoping to create something that is unbiased in terms of gender and is enjoyable to all audiences who experience it.

As said, my initial ideas for the brief were to create infographics which represented the data in a fun and interesting way. I collected some imagery (shown to the left) of desings which I felt were reflective of how I wanted the designs to appear. These designs are, although simplistic, very effective and an interesting way to present the data to an audience.

These are the initial concepts that I created for the infographic designs, howeber I really didn’t feel like they were very effective and there was nothing that really captured the attention of the viewer.

I decided to create a moodboard to help me understand the kind of mood that I wanted to portray in teh designs. This is shown on the following pages. Using the mind map I then shot a series of phtoos which I felt were representative of similar attitude as the mindmap. Fun, quirky and enjoyable.

Check out the animations on Vimeo at: https://vimeo.com/142406557 & https://vimeo.com/142905487

It was at this point I decided that I wanted to create the concept of an app interface which allowed the user to intereact with their fitness goals and track their progress daily.

These were the initial sketches for my designs, and some of the sketches I created for the icons I would be using on the app.

On the following pages I have included images of both the final icons and the app design that I created.

Check out the final animation on Vimeo at: https://vimeo.com/145648911

I decided to do some more research on the layout and appearence of other apps, particularly fitness apps. I soon realised that they often had a very limited colour pallette and also very simplistic icons.

In my previous deisngs, the icons were not as simple as they should have been and I had used way too many colours, I think this is what gave the app the childish appearence. The icons also looked far too heavy with the black outlines on them and the designs were very far from the sleek look of the app designs shown on the other page.

I also decided to look at some examples for icons that have been created to see how they are able to represent the designs simply, but without losing character. You can see the examples I found to the left.

I decided that the app design wasn’t up to the standard that I wanted. It was very biased towards a female audience and the icon designs made it look very childish.

I decided to re-design the app interface from a completely new perspective. To give it a more adult appearence I decided to work with the idea of endorphins, a chemical produced after workouts which gives you the feeling of happiness. To represent this I created a few sketch ups of molecule designs and then incoorperated them into the logo alongside different text styles to see which would work best.

On the following page I have also included all of my experiments for the colour and layout of the design, incoorperating the logo and ideas for the different kinds of pages that I wanted to include withing the app. I opted for the colour green in the end as I felt that it best represented the healthy feel off the app that I wanted to represent. As you can see I also simplified the icons and line work to create a much more mature looking app.

I decided that on the previous experiment there was too much green, and that by seperating the green out with another, lighter colour it created a much more aesthetically pleasing outcome. I opted for a very light cream colour with a hint of the green tone in there to complement the other colours.

On the left you can see a few of the experiments that I tried out, and different ways that I could seperate the designs to create the most effective and user friendly layout. To the right you can see the final designs I opted for.

I created an animation to advertise the app, the selling points of the app was both the ability to track your progress and compare data from now and last year. Along with the ability to see your happiness which is shown through the movement off the app which reacts to the data that the user is to input.

I reflected the key elements of the app through the animation, such as the ability to physically see your happiness on the interface along with many of the tracking features that are available to use. Although some of the features of the animation are added for the purposes of aesthetics, I have tried to use as much of the actual interface as posisble to advertise it.

Check out the final animation on Vimeo at: https://vimeo.com/165367154