MY MINI BAR

The Challenge:
To build & design an iOS/Android Application from scratch by the end of 2018.

The Process:
1. Understand the Targeted User & Brand
2. Competitive Analysis
3. Survey & Interviews
4. User Stories & Flows
5. Lo-Fidelity Sketches & Prototypes
6. Hi-Fidelity Wireframes
7. Test and Receive Feedback & Iterative Analysis

The Goal:
Complete a design / prototype of my very first application & practice the process of Design Thinking. Eventually, the end goal of the app will be served to keep track of users' drinking habit & storage.

Competitive Analysis & Research

The concept of MY MINI BAR for iOS was initially designed for booze lovers to manage their personalized spirits inventory at anytime from anywhere.

Once I had committed to build the product & as I was trying to figure out what my users want from the product, I have decided to work on a Competitive Analysis, so that I would get the benefit from determining what information will add value and then see if that can come from the analysis. Moreover, it would be great to see how the others solve the similar problems and try to not reinvent the wheel.

This analysis included the competitors' profile, marketing strategy, core functions, and their product Strengths & Weakness. I analyzed 4 competitors, and by this research & comparison, I was able to draw up several core features which would define MY MINI BAR's MVP.

MY MINI BAR's core MVP features include:
- Drinking Diary / Log
- Analytics including the Data of Frequency & Streaks (by Week, Month, Year)
- Record a Pour
- Bottle Ratings
- Remarks

User Stories & User Flows

User stories are part of an agile approach that helps shift the focus from writing about requirements to talking about them. All agile user stories include a written sentence or two and, more importantly, a series of conversations about the desired functionality. I did some research & found the following template would be quite useful for writing user stories:

As a < type of user >, I want < some goal > so that < some reason >.‍

Here is a few examples of user stories from MY MINI BAR. As I would be able to know,
1. Who are my users?
2. What are the issues / pain points?
3. How would I solve the problems?

As it turns out, I have established a few ground rules of how to structure the app as I was proceeding to User Flows & UI Design.

This is what it is like as I was building a wire flow upon one of the user stories with the user goal <Create New Bottle Profile>. This could be purely textual flows; however, I realized using some quick boxes & shapes and UI components may really help keeping my focus in tasks.

And for functionality-wise, it would also be nice to mention this; here's some early stage quick ideation of a very simple user registration & user onboarding flow above.

Lo-Fidelity Sketching & Prototyping

As an Art / Graphic Design Graduate, I was pretty used to sketching stuff & ideas out on my sketchbook. Here, I learned that hand sketching can actually be very helpful in the early stage UI Designing phase.

After rapid sketching, I proceeded to creating some Lo-Fi Wireframes. At the time, I was more proficient with Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator than Sketch for tools; therefore, for a clickable prototype, I imported my wireframes into Invision Studio's Web App, Invision App (Very user-friendly amateur tool), and simply dragged & drew a few boxes of hotspots to create those links & navigations.

Hi-Fidelity Wireframing

Finally, it came to the point where I wanted to test the details of MY MINI BAR APP in terms of UI elements, colour schemes, and interactions. And I was very excited to share the outcome some of the UI design mockups.

My UI critique for myself would be the lack of design consistency because I was using a wide range of components from different Design Systems. However, later on, I made a few adjustments on the UI elements. I was quite fresh in designing UI for mobile devices at the time; therefore, I started following the design principles of Airbnb's open source library.

"Airbnb has a clear mission that drives all of our decisions: To help build a world where everyone on earth can feel like they belong anywhere. When applied to product design, the key principles this translates to are designing for trust and designing for everyone."

Airbnb is well-known for their design, so I put in some thoughts, and started to re-design MY MINI BAR APP based on their UI elements (colour palette, icons fonts etc) & guidelines..