Check out the research and design work conducted by our team of Interactive Arts & Technology students during the creation of Sawyer, including experience maps for clients and providers, early wireflows of the app, and even some of the key design components.
Our initial research consisted upon researching the domain. We found a category that our team has had experience with which is using services in the shared economy. In that sector, we noticed a lack of easy to use applications in our area which began the idea of Sawyer. Sawyer has the goal of providing skilled workers with an innovative platform to offer their labour to clients, while providing the customer an easy to use, all in one application to hire professional labour.
To gather data for a successful application, we conducted an analysis on other pre-existing services such as Taskrabbit, Craigslist, and Zaarly to find out what they did well, what they didn’t, and the features that lacked.
The interface needed to have a clear theme, be extremely legible as well as pleasing to the eye. After testing several colour palettes, we landed on using a combination of colours, with emerald green as the primary option.
Picking the correct typography was of great importance as it is a major element of the visual design. Several sans serif typefaces were tested including Roboto and Futura but Poppins was chosen due to its legibility and ability to capture the modern and clean aesthetic that was trying to be achieved.
Our application components were designed in line with the chosen colour palettes. Appropriate sized buttons were created with rounded edges as they are easier to follow and the navigation buttons had to be easily recognized when selected or not.
The greybox wireflows allowed for us to have a scope of majority of elements in the application. We were able to plan how the design was going to be organized and where the interactions took place.
The completed wireflows added colour, more detailed elements, and text to give a more detailed scope on what the application would look like before prototyping. We were able to see if the correct design elements were in place such as the highlighted home button in the navigation bar.
The experience map is able to visualize the end-to-end experience for both the customer and provider, taking them through the steps needed for the expected result through our app. With the maps we were able to detail frustrations that users could have and how we could solve them.
With our provider experience map, it reflected on frustrations workers would have when looking for jobs and how our application could fix those issues as well as laying out the process from the provider creating an account to receiving successful payment and feedback.