Application Design I / PROJECT 1: Application Design Proposal
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Daphne Lai Yu Cheng / 0366380
DST60504 / Application Design I / Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media / Taylors' University
Week 1 (22/9/2025):
- Provide seamless user experience, boosting engagement, retention and overall customer satisfaction.
- Thoughtful design can also improve app performance and accessbility.
- Attention to detail in intuitive navigation, responsive layouts and natural interactions can set successful apps apart from their competitiors.
Understanding Usability (Defining Usability):
- Defining Usability: How effectively and efficiently a user can accomplish their goals when interacting with a product.
- Applying Usability Principles: Ensure an application's design is tailored to the needs and behaviours of its target users.
- Conducting Usability Testing: Observing users' interaction with an application and gather feedback.
- Developing Practical Skills: Develop profiency in design tools, prototyping techniques and user research methodologies.
Importance of Mobile in the Digital Era:
- Ubiquity of Smartphones.
- Mobile First Approach.
- Shift in User Behaviour.
- Competitive Advantage.
Challenges:
Limited Screen Real Estate
- To prioritise content and interactions to ensure a clean, uncluttered user interface.
Diverse Device Capabilities
- To accommodate a wide range of device specifications, screen sizes and input methods to ensure a consistent and responsive user experiences across different platforms.
Contextual Awareness
- Design must consider factors like lcation, connectivity and user mobility when crafting the application's functionality and interface.
- Research.
- Ideation.
- Prototyping.
- Testing.
Research: Gather insights into their needs, behaviours and pain points to establish a solid understanding of the target audience
Design: Creating prototypes, wireframes and mockups to address the identified user needs.
Evaluate: Usability testing and user feedback to identify areas for improvement.
- Increased User Satisfaction.
- Improved Product Adoption.
- Reduced Development Costs.
- Enhanced Branding Reputation.
Designing for Mobile Usability:
- Understand user needs.
- Prioritise key features.
- Optimise for mobile.
- Validate and iterate.
Prototyping and Testing:
- To explore design concepts and get early user feedback. Example: Paper prototypes and clickable wireframes.
- A more sophisticated , interactive prototypes. Tools: InVision and Adobe XD.
- To uncover usability issues and refine the design by gathering insights throughout the design process.
Designing for Small Screens
- Compact Layout: Optimise design elements and content and ensure a clean and uncluttered user interface.
- Intuitive Navigation: Swiping, tapping and scrolling to explore contents.
- Tactile Interactions: Designing interactions that are responsive to user's fingertips.
- Visual Hierarchy: Prioritise the most important information and features and ensure they are easily accessible.
Gestures and Interactions
- Tap: To select, activate and interact.
- Swipe: Smooth navigation, scrolling and revealing additional content or controls.
- Pinch: To zoom in and out (viewing images, maps or other visual contents).
- Drag: Rearranging items, adjusting sliders and other interactions that require direct manipulation.
Optimising for Performance
Key strategies:
- Minimising app size and cache.
- Leveraging caching and lazy loading techniques.
- Optimising network request and data transmission.
Week 2 (1/10/2025):
- Puts users at the forefront of the entire product development process.
- Designers focus on understanding user needs and incorporating that understanding into every stage of design from the very beginning to the final products.
Process:
- Business requirements.
- User personas.
- Ideation.
- Experience mapping.
- User experience.
- User interface.
- Usability testing.
- Prototype validation.
- Minimun viable product (MVP).
- Production.
- Use satisfaction.
- Trust in the system.
- Number of visit referral.
- Traffic/Audience size.
- Return visitors.
- Visit from search.
- Number of user errors.
- Ease of use.
- Ease of learning.
- Development time & cost.
- Maintenance cost.
- Redesign cost.
UI/UX Comparison Chart
- Utility: being functional.
- Usability: easily use it.
- Desirability: visual appearance, feel.
- Brand experience: positive brand experience.
After lecture, Mr Sylvain assigned us into group to design a user friendly air ticket, below was our design for the air ticket:
Figure 1.2 Air Ticket Design (1/10/2025)
Week 3 (8/10/2025):
Usability:
- Effectiveness, efficiency and success of a user in utilising a product or design within a specific context.
- Clarity and learnability: How well users can achieve their goals within a product or design, how quickly they can learn it and how many errors they encounter.
- Adapts to user's situation and caters to their specific needs.
- Can be evaluated through testing methods to identify areas for improvement.
Common Usability Pitfalls:
- A wide ranges of features can overwhelm users.
- Information organisation is not logical or consistent.
- Lack of clear labeling and instructions.
- Lack of search functionality.
- Inconsistent layout.
- Users spend excessive time searching for the information they need.
- Increased bounce rates (Users leave website or application after only viewing one page).
- Unclear or poorly placed CTAs can lead to missed opportunities for engagement and conversion.
- Lack of guidance.
- Vague error messages like "An error occured" does not tell users on what went wrong or how to fix it.
- User friendly.
- Cohesive experience.
- Intuitive navigation.
- Familiarity and learnability.
- Stronger brand identity.
- Effortless to use.
- Crystal clear communication.
- Progressive disclosure (Minimising the number of steps users need to take to complete tasks).
- Clarity and hierarchy.
- Focus and attention.
- State change: Visual cues to indicate the state of ineractive elements (buttons, menus).
- Call to Action (CTA) Design: Provide clear visual cues to indicate the state of interactive elements (buttons, menus).
- Well placed icons, menus and clear labeling: All features and functionalities within the app should be discoverable.
- Confirmation and clarity.
- Guidance and learning: Textual messages, visual cues, sounds and haptic feedback.
- Reduce frustation
- Increased efficiency
- Improved accuracy
- Input validation: Features that validate user input before actions are taken.
- Clear feedback: Provide clear and immediate feedback to users after any interaction.
- Confirmation steps: Consider adding confirmation steps for critical actions that could lead to unintended consequences so users can double check their input/selection.
Week 4 (8/10/2025):
Week 4 lectures were taught on week 5 as replacement class.
Week 5 (22/10/2025):
Card Sorting Method:
- Informs the design of navigation menus, website or app architecture and content strategy.
- To understand how users group and catergorise information.
- Helps determine an organisation scheme that aligns with users' mental models.
- Open: Ideal for understanding how users intuitively organise information.
- Closed: Useful for testing specific groupings.
- Hybrid: Blends open and closed card sorting.
- Remote
- Moderated
- Unmoderated
Pros & Cons of Card Sorting
Figure 1.3 Pros & Cons of Card Sorting
User Experience Research:
- Understanding user behaviours, needs and attitudes through various observation and feedback collection methods.
- Employ the appropriate methods at the right stages of product development.
UX Research Comparison Chart
Figure 1.4 UX Research Comparison Chart
1) Starting Early
- Foundation of understanding
- Concept validation
- Continuous feedback
- User centric adjustments
- Post launch insights
- Product Benefits
- Business Benefits
- User Benefits
5 Steps of UX Research:
2) Hypotheses
3) Methods
4) Conduct
5) Synthesize
UI/UX Documents:
- Online survey
- Interview
- User persona
- Card sorting
- Information architecture map
- Flow chart
UX Research Methods:
1) Qualitative: Interviews and observation, user groups, moderated card sort and usability testing.
2) Quantitative: Online surveys, unmoderated card sort, web / app analytics and eyetracking testing.
Figure 1.5 Qualitative & Quantitative Comparison Chart
After lecture, we were to group up for the card sorting group activity:
Figure 1.6 Brief of Card Sorting Group Activity
The assigned application is a travelling application and we were to sort the features and rearrange them into suitable pages.
Figure 1.7 Outcome of Card Sorting (22/10/2025)
INSTRUCTIONS
Project 1: Application Design Proposal
Assignment Brief:
RESEARCH Guidelines:
1. Problem Statement
Elevator pitch of your project, explain in a few words the problem
you're going to solve
2. Company intro
What are they doing, where, for who... basic intro about the
company
3. Company app
- Show the main features
- Evaluate 3 great things and 3 lacking things about the app (according to you)
- Summarize user reviews (both good and bad), what are the things we can do about them
as designers?
- Analyze the app from a usability point of view
- Gut feeling/opportunities: what do you feel can be better, what do you want to
do about this app?
4. Market research
- Find 3 competitors of your selected app, what do they do great, what is lacking, what feature can you bring into your project?
- Left field: what feature would be great for your project that doesn't come from
your market?
5. Conclusion
Based on all these, where is your project going next?
TIPS:
- Start in your main language and translate to English later, maybe even keep a version of
the presentation in your language that you can refer to.
- I prefer you write a short text with mistakes yourself, than a full page of chatGPT fluff.
- Highlight key words and important stuff on every text.
- Show what you're referring to with images.
- I want to see what matters to you, the examples you like, and how you think!
Week 1
- I chose KOI The Malaysia app to redesign, I listed out the problems of the app and Mr Sylvain told me to do more research on the application for now.
Week 2
- Mr Sylvain said my problem statement can be more straightforward, just list down what am I planning to do for the application redesign.
Week 3
- Gut feeling slide is good.
- Include screenshots and elaborate in the slides, speed up progress.
Week 4
-
Week 5
- Interface don't have to show so many pages, just the overall will do.
- Conclusion don't mean anything, state the features you want to incorporate into the KOI The Malaysia application redesign such as add tier system from CHAGEE? Delivery feature from ZUS Coffee?
Overall, this project was a great introduction to application design as I was able to identify various flaws and usability issues within the existing app. Researching competitor applications broadened my perspective and helped me understand how to improve my selected app to make it more intuitive and user friendly. Reviewing user feedback also provided valuable insights on areas that needed enhancement to create a smoother and more seamless user experience. Through this project, I learned the importance of usability and discovered how methods like card sorting can help designers identify interface problems and make effective improvements.
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