After completing my UX Certification course, I wanted to explore visual design some more. To do so, I completed another course on Coursera titled "Visual Elements of User Interface Design" by California Institute of the Arts.
For the course project, I chose the prompt of designing the concept for an instrument tuning app.
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Defining the Look and Feel of Your Project
To start our project, we first had to define the concept of our app and target audience.
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We also put together a mood board for inspiration as well as planning the look and feel for our project. The mood board was completed by looking up images on Google and creating a collage on PowerPoint that included a color theme and main font type.
I wanted to create a fun and colorful design since learning to play a musical instrument is supposed to be fun. I also wanted the tuning process to be almost like a game that would inspire and encourage the user as they are learning to tune their instrument.
*As a side note, the video game "Dance Dance Revolution" came to mind as I was planning how the interactions of the app would look to create that fun, game-like environment.
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Create a Sample Pattern Library
Next, we created a sample pattern library for the app's buttons and icons.
I created them all using what was available within PowerPoint such as shapes, clip art, etc.
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Sketch Your Static Interface
From there, and as the final project of this particular course, we began to plan out how the interface would look.
These mockups were created using clip art and shapes in PowerPoint as well as one of the pictures found during the completion of the project's mood board - which is the picture of the violin strings that is from the J.S. Fisher Violins website.
The image was altered slightly in PowerPoint before I added colored shapes for the pegs and strings which the user can select instead of the letter buttons if they prefer.
The mockups for the tuning screening would be interactive. As the user plays their instrument, the colored bars would appear and fluctuate. Feedback and encouragement would pop up on the screen as the user works on tuning their instrument until it matches the target note.
The user can also toggle the sound of the target note as needed so they can hear the target note for themselves.
Once the target note and the user's played sound matches, they will be able to see this on the screen with a message of achievement as well as the option to tune another string.
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This project was a lot of fun and allowed me to explore another approach to visual design planning. Had this project proceeded past the planning stage, I would have liked to create my own image for the violin strings.
The colored bars showing the user's sound would also have been animated - which is another skill I plan to learn and explore in the future - to bring the app alive and make it more interactive as the user is playing/tuning their instrument.