In this weeks lesson we had a critique class were we uploaded our screens to a Miro board and the lecturer critiqued our work. We also were introduced to a brief of our next project, which will be creating a dashboard for a week in our lives, including steps, travels, phone usage etc.

At first we were introduced to this board, the lecturer explained classmates could also leave a comment to help further on our designs, I really liked this idea. The three rectangles represented what we should continue, what we should stop, and what we should start.

For the critique we were asked to upload the screens to our music app we have been creating. Below are the screens I had uploaded.

To start off, my lecturer noticed that my screens were very cluttered, with a lot going on, this could potentially confuse or overwhelm the reader with the amount of information and buttons. He advised that I include a scroll option for the user and enlarge the squares on the playlist/search page therefore the user isn’t confused on where to look and there’s space reducing clutter. I also think that my screens are too cluttered and a scroll option for the screens would enhance the users experience.

I increased the size of the squares rearranged the position to make it a similar layout to my previous one yet not so cluttered. I used frames and prototypes to achieve this scroll behaviour , now the user can scroll down and choose the playlist or artist they want without being intimated by the amount on their screen. Below is how I changed the screen to look, I think this is such an improvement from the previous design I had made.

Another thing the lecturer critiqued was the size of my icons in the navigation bar, looking at my screen now they are definitely too big and I need to resize them to a more appropriate width and height.

I think resizing the icons slightly to be smaller was has improved the look so much, making it more appealing and friendly, I am a lot happier with my icons now.

He suggested that I move about my homepage buttons around, to where the “create your own” section and the “albums we think you’d like” section where swapped about and the illustration was moved to the top. I also thought the layout of my homepage looked slightly cluttered, I wanted to make the changes the lecturer suggested to see how it turned out.

Being honest I didn’t know how I felt about it and thought it looked even more cluttered after replacing this position of the squares. The bottom section and the scroll section made it look like there was way to much going on.

I had placed the illustrations in the middle to sort of break up the layout. I did like how the illustrations looked at the top because if it was in the position I had it beforehand, I felt like there was too much illustrations in one place, so I decided to keep that. But I ended up reverting back to the original design as I thought it looked less cluttered than my re design. I am really happy with how this looks and it is definitely a lot better and more aesthetic than the previous design