Wednesday 27 November 2013

Mobile App Design - "ReferrED"

Last June I took part in a hackathon in San Francisco. It was called "Hacktivate ED" and it was 100% focused on solving problems in education. With my team we decided to tackle the issue of bad behaviour in class. We found out that a big problem nowadays is that there is a lot of paperwork involved in referring misbehaving students to the principal. This is distracting to the teacher and causes only more class time to be wasted. Because forms easily get lost the current process is also prone to breaking off valuable paper trail. In order to solve this problem together with my teammates we created an app that allows the teacher to easily capture what had happend and pass the info to the administration.

The app can tap into the school's scheduling / student data and use this contextual information to instantly tell what is the current class and list of present students. From the list of students the teacher then selects the culprit and gets to the referral screen. There the teacher adds either a voice or text message with the description of incident and sends it off to the school's admin via email. The admin receives the notification in the inbox and is able to follow up using the web portal which we also built. We called the app "ReferrED".

We worked on it for the full 24 hours and managed to get the prototype up and running literally just a few minutes before it was due. It was totally worth the hard work: not only did we win two awards in the hackathon but also met a whole lot of amazing people.

Below are my mockups of the user interface refreshed a bit today to reflect the changes brought in the meantime by iOS7.



Sunday 3 November 2013

Presentation tools: past & future

I was searching for something on Dribbble the other day. For some reason their algorithms came up with an interesting suggestion from one of the users — Colin Miller. Colin made a series of illustrations depicting three different kinds of workspaces using only a single stroke line and a single background colour. I instantly liked his style. A couple of weeks later I went out for a run in the hills of Montara and all over a sudden had an idea. I thought about using this very same convention to show different presentation tools. I soon realised there was a pattern — each presentation tool was closely related to the era it was used in e.g., the blackboard in the "old days" or the whiteboard in office spaces of the 1980s. So the idea soon became "how presentation tools evolved over time". I thought it would help me explain how I see CooCoolu compared to other tools available on the market. It took me two days to finish but I enjoyed every moment of it. Here are the results.

Presentation tools: past & future

1830s

1980s

2000s

2014