The Creative Process
For my Mobile Application Design course, I collaborated with classmates to create a mobile operating system and its core applications such as Messages, design language, and design system.
Identifying Opportunities
We had free-flowing brainstorm sessions with lot of ideas, discussions, and energy. We narrowed the topic down to being mentally overwhelmed with notifications and hours of scrolling through social media. From there, we conducted secondary research and grouped our findings into major problems and subsequent opportunity spaces.
Conducting User Research
To better understand user pain points regarding notifications, we sent out a survey which got over 50 responses and conducted several interviews. We also looked into what gestures people find the most intuitive when interacting with a phone.
Translating Research Insights Into Designs
With our research insights, user personas, and use cases always at the forefront of our design decisions, we delved deeper into ideation. The UX patterns, UI components, app layouts, and interactions were designed with these design guidelines: built for smaller screens, use minimal interactions to help users achieve what they want to do, doesn’t distract users from living in the present, and make everything clear to understand instead of assuming users know how to use the design.
Seeking Feedback and Making Improvements
We continued to refine the 15 apps into high-fidelity mockups and fleshed out our style guide which were guided by our user's needs, pain points, and motivations, our design principles and goals, and feedback from our professor and classmates.
Presenting the Product
After countless hours of design studios, meetings, and design reviews, we proudly presented our operating system: EquOS, an OS designed not to be used. We were rated by industry professionals and received 5/5 stars for our consistent, thoughtful, and mature design & features that reflected our design language.
