At the beginning of the project, I was really inspired by the idea of creating an app which promotes sustainability in tourism. I began to brainstorm ideas for a fun product that could do so and was interested in creating a travel service aimed towards children of primary school age; allowing the young users to discover fairy doors found around Northern Irish National Trust parks. This app’s environmentally friendly purpose is to encourage families to utilise the great natural landscapes available at home, rather than accumulate the release of carbon emissions created by flying to other countries. I made user flows, theorising how my app would work in practice and was inspired by the viral 2016 gaming app PokemonGo. Similarly to PokemonGo, my fairy door app would allow children to use the app to track down fairy doors on a map interface before scanning a QR code to reveal interactive, augmented reality mystical creatures that could only be viewed using the mobile camera. I have also included some sketches I created for this app and while I ended up choosing to create an adventure/adrenaline junkie target app, I think that these initial ideas were really fun to complete and also useful in familiarising myself with user flows later on in the development of my app.
In the early stages of my travel app, after moving on from the fairy door idea – I also briefly considered another app with a younger audience. The below shows some sketches of a concept called “Deep Dive” in which the primary school aged user could travel digitally to different exciting and crazy underwater locations; learning interesting facts about the locations including Lake Baikal which I include in many wireframes below. Again, I did not use this idea however the process of sketching and evolving characters to Figma and creating low-fidelity wireframes was really useful. I enjoyed considered how I could create exciting and animated characters, drawing inspiration from a moodboard including below on Miro of images like Jules Verne-esque books and their colour palettes and creating exaggerated icons like a submarine that reflects the apps theme. I also created hand drawn continuous line sketches of a diver which I considered for a character, that I adapted on Figma.
