Mounika Konidala 

Buddy Scheduler - A Mobile App for Scheduling Events

 

 





Role: UX designer, UX researcher, Graphic Designer

 

Platform : IOS (for both iphone and ipad)

 

Tools: Axure , Paper prototype 

 

Design Problem : 

 

The goal of the project is to develop a mobile app focused on solving any day to day problem. One of the common issue we have among any group of friends is to plan for any event like going to lunch or movie or for that matter going on an outing. It is not an easy task to come out with a location and timing which is acceptable to all the friends in a group. We often have to go through many iterations and re scheduling when finalizing on a venue and time. Therefore we built three personas and wanted to focus on the people who are facing difficulty in scheduling an event in a short period of time.

 

Design Solution :

 

We proposed an application, and after defining the goal of the project and identifying the basic functionalities of the app we moved towards requirements gathering for the app development. As part of the requirement gathering, we prepared a questionnaire and distributed among the graduate students. Most of the answers to the survey were suggesting they have faced difficulty in scheduling events with friends and there is a need for such an app. Finally, we come up with the several facilities for helping effective scheduling solution for buddies.

 

Design Process :

 

The project implementation was done in three stages. Phase 1 deals with identifying the basic functionalities and coming up with a project proposal. Phase 2 mainly concentrates on requirement gathering and Design elements. Phase 3 deal with creating hi-fi app prototype using Axure prototyping tool.

 

Our first Lo-Fi prototype was hand drawn based on our sketches. After a round of heuristic evaluation, we presented the improved Lo-Fi prototype to conduct the first round of user testing with three students and three professors. We then improved the prototype and built an IOS phone application using Axure as our Mid-Fi prototype. We conducted ten user testing including field tests about their realistic experience of using the buddy scheduler app about the possible screens and interactions between each screen and internal controls. The prototype demonstrates the screens for categories like Restaurants, Movies and Outing.Overall, the results showed that all participants thought the application was useful for scheduling events in a short period without conflicting the ideas from individuals and that the support of app was helpful for them to illustrate the best scheduling spots for outing.

 

For this project, I started around November 2013. This project is still under development and I am working through all the different use cases and flows as of now. Representing here are the “happy paths” and doesn’t account for all the various use cases (ex. error messages, on-click states, etc.). There is still a feature I am still developing and is still in conception, which is the data accessing from the internet feature. Initially, I was going to do a very simple feature, for example, one person in a group wants to explore some place which is near to him and far from the others, he can support to visit that place by showing some beautiful pictures about that place through google search engine. But I am still playing with the idea as to how I can automate this process and give it a more seamless way of transaction. 

 

Prototype Details:-

 

Below is the link for to access the workable prototype. It is developed using axure

 

http://share.axure.com/9PP85X/Login_Page.html

 

(Please Contact me to access the link)