ARTS 347: Figma Module 3 and Project 1 Reflection

This week we read Figma Module 3 on the importance of prototyping in design. This article emphasizes the importance of prototyping and the goal of prototyping in making sure that your design works in the hands of the user, which is the most important and fundamental part of UX design. I saw this when designing my mobile app screens and widgets for Project 1 as I had to focus on user accessibility rather than on the design itself which is much different from what I have learned in the past when designing for print. The article then lists three ways prototyping helps designers such as validating early concepts in the wireframes before fully flushing out the details of the designs, facilitating communication, and refining features and flows. These last two are super useful in my opinion as I found it really helpful to even go to the prototype feature in this first project even though we didn't have to do any prototyping and movement within Figma just yet, just seeing it in the frame of the device and being able to click through the pages allowed me to step back and decide what was working and what needed to be changed. The idea that prototyping is so crucial in terms of communication I think will be beneficial when we start prototyping as you can test your designs by getting another set of eyes on your project and make improvements and catch anything that may not be working that as the designer are easy to overlook.

Mockups of my mobile screens and widgets (above)

This week we also finished and presented our first project of branding a luxury sub-brand of Delta Airlines. Some of this was very similar to the airline rebrand project that I did in ARTS 245 such as creating logos and researching the parent airline, as well as creating an airplane wrap. However, for this project, much of the focus was on designing 4 mobile app screens and three different-sized widgets. This was very daunting to me at first, as someone who is just learning Figma and never worked designing anything for a mobile screen. Much of the focus was on readability and accessibility as I had to think about how the user could at a quick glance see the most important information and how to set up a system in which all the information like gate, seats, times, and status were very clearly shown in an interesting and understandable way that wasn't too over-designed. This was one of the hardest parts for me in this project was just adjusting to designing for UX instead of print because you have to be more conscious about relaying information and the accessibility of your designs to a wide range of people as it needs to be usable to a mass amount of people. Even though I felt my design was a bit simple and lacked personality, I think that the clean and simple design was what was needed for the project and made it usable and accessible. Overall I learned a lot about designing for UX in this project as well and I feel that I have gotten a ton more knowledge about how to use Figma which will be good as I continue into the next assignment.