Adobe XD Mobile App Challenge
Overview
Having no experience working with mobile apps before this, I thought an Adobe XD Challenge would be a fun way to learn both Adobe XD and to get some mobile design experience. For 9 days you are given prompts such as “create a home screen” or “add a map feature to your app” and 24 hours later you can present them online or on a Slack channel for feedback. It was a really fun iterative and collaborative way to learn a new software and work on my design skills.
We had to create a mobile food delivery app and I went with a classic - pizza. I based it off a local pizza place we used to order from - but one without any mobile ordering capabilities at all. That way what I was designing was all from scratch. At the end we compiled our work into a design system to showcase how we selected colors, typography and icons.
Design Process
The design process was not much different than a real project - it started with competitive research to see what food ordering apps were out there. I looked at Seamless and GrubHub and did a small SWOT analysis to see what was working for those apps and what FoodMood could have as a competitive advantage.
It was then onto quick, low quality wireframes of ideas as a way to figure out spacing and what features I wanted to include in the app. The prompts were pretty open ended and didn’t require that people include many elements, which allowed us to figure out as UX designers what necessary features should be in an app.
Once I felt as if I had a grasp on exactly how the feature could work in several different ways and my user stories were appropriately met, it was time to create the wireframes. I mocked up 3 different scenarios that would be presented to the engineering team for further review. We discussed what worked, what didn’t work and whether or not the user cases and user asks were being met. After several small iterations we came up with final wireframes that engineering took to begin work on. The 9 days flew by as I did this in my downtime outside of work, but it was worth the challenge. I learned a lot about mobile app design in terms of proportions and constraints and I learned to use a new prototyping tool that I really enjoyed.
