Reflecting on my bank app project, I have learned a lot about the importance of user experience and interface design. I realized that creating a seamless and intuitive user experience can significantly impact the app's success. My figma skills have also improved, especially in terms of manipulating shapes and creating seamless transitions across my screens . However, there were challenges along the way, main one being managing time spent on project, as I feel as though I hyper fixated on certain aspects during my app creation. These experiences have taught me the value of good project management and research. Looking forward, I aim to improve my skills on figma , do more research whilst I’m on a project as this can help ad more ideas to the ongoing project, and learning more about user-centered design.
At the beginning of this course in the first semester I learned that we’d be creating a banking app in our second semester and that got me very excited and I happily looked forward to applying my creativity. Although I felt a bit anxious at first because figma was still foreign to me, but I learned along the way by trial and error and by asking my peers and tutor for some guidance, some YouTube tutorials also helped bring the banking app to life. When research was mentioned it put me off a bit because I’ve always struggled to start research, I like getting straight into the work then research whilst I’m doing my work as I think this helps me find new inspirations to add onto my work, but surprisingly researching for this project wasn’t as tedious as I anticipated, I really enjoyed getting out of the class and walking to HSBC to ask them a few questions about how functional and reliable their app is, it was also nice researching other brands as this taught me how to present my brand and be appealing to my demographic. We also did some exercises in class, one being the the wordmark exercise in which we had to make the words look like what they mean, for example when it came to the word look I made the two “O”s look like eyes, another exercise we did was the logomark exercise where we had to create an animal of our choice with different shapes, I made an elephant, and I must say it was really fun doing these exercises, it too the stress off my shoulders a bit and besides that it was nice seeing my peers’ work, it made me realise how creative and smart they are. I really enjoy seeing my peers’ work because it inspires and pushes me to be more creative.
The idea generation process was very fun. I was finding it very hard to come up with ideas, eventually the ideas flowed in whilst I was doing mundane things and what I learned from this is that creativity doesn’t have a switch that can be simply turned, you have to find inspirations and wait for the ideas to flow in.
I loved learning how to use the interactions and flows on figma when I was creating my banking app, I did come across some complications such as things being laid out wrongly on different screens. There was a point where I had to change my colour palette because it wasn’t colour blind safe, hence moving forward when working on any new projects I will double check and make sure that the colour palette I use is accessible. One thing I regret not doing was creating component sets, this made things tedious but I enjoyed the challenge
Overall I really enjoyed this module with its ups and down, I feel very confident in my UI/UX design skills now and I’m looking forward to applying what I’ve learned to any future projects, I’m proud of the banking app that I made and I loved every bit of the banking app creation as it gave me an insight on how a brand is created