Andrea Ho
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100 Day Design Challenge

I officially began on February 26, 2017 and completed the design challenge on June 5, 2017. I began with little to no design knowledge, and my goal was to become familiar and quicker with design tools and see how much I've improved from Day 1 all the way to Day 100.

The most valuable lesson I’ve learned in the past 100 days was that designing wasn’t just simply placing nice colours and shapes onto a page. It’s really about solving the greater user experience problem, to provide a seamless, problem-free experience for all users, whether it be within an app or a website.

Day 60 - Text Me

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I change the visuals of a current app that was built in my phone. The text messenging app. There is definitely nothing wrong with my current app, but I wanted to see what I can come up with.

For the main screen of the app, I wanted to make it obvious which messages are read by creating a distinct colour background of the unread and read boxes. Not only that, I added a coloured orange circle for the unread messages. I wasn't sure if adding two signals for unread messages was too much, but I think it works better, especially for those who are unable to distinquish different shades of black and white.

As for the personal text messaging screen on the right, I had to decide what kind of text bubbles I wanted them to be. I really liked facebook's style of text bubbles, so I decided to replicate it. As for the colours, instead of making them different colours, I decided to make one of them unfilled and the other filled so that it wouldn't get too messy. I think this worked really well.

The only thing I wasn't sure of was whether I should've added a menu button for the solo text messaging screen. The menu would include things such as delete messages, but I figured if the user wants to delete certain messages, they would hold down the specific message. As for page layout edits, such as colour and font, I figured it'd get too messy if each contact had different styles, so I decided to stick with the general layout edit. This means that if the user decides to change the text messaging app theme, it'll be applied to all text messages. This can be changed through the main screen of the app.

 
Andrea Ho