VERY VARY
Branding and App Design Case Study
PROJECT BRIEF
Very Vary was created to serve the purpose of providing users the ability of redesigning their home digitally, to reduce the time, sweat, and unknown of revamping their space. This project was created and designed for my UX/UI & Web Design (II) class during the Spring 2021 semester at Clemson University.
THE PROBLEM
The issue that in order to physically redesign a home space, you have to move everything and take everything down to officially start. Sometimes the ideas you have in your head do not work out, and now you have wasted time for a failed idea. A second problem is that when shopping for home decor, you have to go to individual websites to search their products, instead of being able to do a mass search for a specific item sold from multiple retailers and companies.
THE GOAL
Very Vary was created to serve the purpose of providing an app for users to have the ability to digitally redesign their own spaces, using the items and decor that they already own, or simply buy new items. The app also allows users to shop from multiple retailers at once, allowing for a quick and vast search for the perfect pieces to put in their home!
MY RESPONSIBILITIES
Branding, user persona, storyboarding, sketching, wireframing, high fidelity designs, prototyping, and style guide.
TOOLS UTILIZED
Sketch, InVision + Craft, Adobe Photoshop
THE PROCESS
DEFINE
Find the problem, and begin generating ways to fix it.
IDEATE
Create sketches, and design styles for the app to utilize.
CREATE
Begin designing the app based on the ideation designs.
TEST
Prototype the design to share with others and receive feedback.
DEFINE
INITIAL PROPOSAL
The app Very Vary needs to allow users to easily redesign a room, while also providing the user to shop multiple stores at once. Design a modern “boho” theme, while also conveying a fun yet minimal design, allowing the pieces to be the main focus. The colors for the brand should be versatile but neutral, allowing the decor pieces to really shine. Overall, the color pallet should be modern, natural, and refreshing.
IDEATE
USER PERSONAS
Determined the target audience, what they should receive from the app, and how exactly the app would help them.
SKETCHING
Laid out all of the screens I would need for creating a completely functional app. Used sketching to formulate various different layouts, design styles ,and ideas that flowed through my head.
WIREFRAMING
The wireframe of your skecthes becomes the backbone of devloping an apps design. This is the starting point of a concrete design, where you can digitally work, then share and recieve feedback from classmates, or my professor. This will highlight any kind of design imperfections, so you can fix them before diving into a fully designed product.
DESIGN
STYLE GUIDE
The style guide for Today’s Crave app design strongly illustrates the theme of the brand, and what to expect for the app design in itself. The style guide gives insight of background elements, brand colors, logos, button styles and icons, and typography elements.
HIGH FIDELITIES
When designing the high fidelities I came to the determination to change a good amount of left sidebar. At first I had planned to use icons for each room (kitchen, living, dining, etc.). With a fully complete design, the icons just didn’t speak to me and I actually hated it. I changed all of the side icons to be just text, but rotated to add some freshness to the design.
TEST
PROTOTYPING
These prototypes were shared with my professor and classmates to receive feedback. The prototypes were created using InVision with the Craft plug-in. While I was able to utilize the Craft plug-in inside of Sketch, making the static design clickable and functional, my Invision subscription did not allow me to transfer the prototype into my Invision account, therefor I do not have an Invision link to share.
LEARNINGS
WHAT THIS PROJECT TAUGHT ME
Icons are great, but know when they are needed, and when they are an accessory– The sidebar on the left I originally planned for icons to be used as well as text. This resulted in just too many icons on one page, and was not really needed on top of text.
Always pay attention to the color use– Designing with these colors was tricky at times due to the colors not having a lot of contrast to each other. The punch of blue sometimes looked odd, but the two rust orange/red colors were too similar and hard to differentiate.
