Wearables aren’t going anywhere. As consumers become more familiar with wearing sensor-based technologies on their physical bodies, 2018 promises a new wave of wearable innovation and experimentation. It’s a sexy space for designers that are intrigued by the idea of working at the intersection of fashion, technology, and all too often wellness, and it adds an additional layer to the significance of user experience design. No longer are experiences consumed merely by engaging with a screen or a device.
One of the requirements was to create a weather app for these wearable devices. One of the major goals of the project was to Create a wearable weather app that will provide the user with a simple and engaging way to personalize weather forecasts to fit their lifestyle.
I worked as the sole UX/UI Designer for this project. I worked together on research, information architecture, interaction design, and user testing. As a team, we split up our efforts to complete the overall application. Then we collaborated with the developer to kick off the design into the development phase.
The project started off by doing market & user research to determine the needs, goals, and wants of Weather Away’s users. A competitive analysis was done to get an overview of similar applications that were already available for Android and Apple iPhone users. User Interviews and Surveys were conducted to determine the user’s frustrations with the current weather application they were using.
Next, Personas and user scenarios were created to tell the story of who Weather Away users are and how they would be using the app. After that, it was time to enter the second phase of the project. In this phase, I helped to determine key metrics, create product feature roadmap, and determine the structure and flow of the app. After making the Flow it was time to put ideas on paper is the first step in wireframing. I like to sketch my wireframes out first that way I can come with lots of ideas quickly and come up with the initial mockups of the screen.
Once we were confident with the low fidelity sketches it was time for us to create a high fidelity wireframe in XD and prototype the whole idea. After prototyping, we made few iterations to make a strong foundation for the visual design, and soon after we tested the prototype we went ahead and made the final User interface using photoshop.
Next, I used Balsamiq to create the low-fidelity wireframes. Lo-fidelity/grayscale wireframes were created with Balsamiq show user flows and the layout of Weather Away. After that, I used SketchApp to create the high fidelity wireframes and created further refine user flows and the layout of Weather Away. After that, I filled the screen with the proper User interface and made the interactive prototype of the application with the high fidelity UI designs and interactive prototype.
One of the major gives away I learned is that while designing for wearables keeping it simple is the key to a successful interface. Unlike desktop and mobile, we cannot add many features and information to the screen; we need to keep the interactions easy and as simple as possible.
