Logo Design (Week 1):

Fizzle An android application that will change the way you drink. by Jace Lu The journey of Fizzle started in summer 2016, in a small classroom that holds over 70 students without AC. Despite the heat, everyone is excited for their upcoming journey. My journey started then and there with five other team members, a journey to make alcohol great again. Team members A successful team needs a successful logo. Our logo, BYTE U, reflects what every college students’ frustration and determination. There are 16000 universities in the world. Millions of students each day have to suffer through classes and exams and more often than not, we are bit right in the a** by the university. And that is the inspiration of our logo. We aim to “byte” university in the a** through technology (byte instead of bite….). Well…this may not be the most creative logo but it sure helped us to tell our stories and also our homework :). Brainstorming for app idea (Week 2): At the start, we know we are going to make mobile application because these days people do most of the things on their mobile phones and mobile application is much more powerful than a simple website. With that in mind, we set on brainstorming. We came up with ideas such as UCSD line up, an app that helps organize messy career fair system and UCSD organization app that aims to help students organizations to attract potential students members. However, all in all they all sound very mainstream and are not problems members of our group are facing. In the end, we came up with an app concept that will help college students to smartly make tasty alcohol to distress. This application will also help college students to make friends over party by matching up through a tinder swipe card alike features. This is a photo of me interviewing students studying in the library about the potential features they hope to see on the app. Competitive Analysis (Week 2) : There are websites mybar.com, somabar.com and others that help us prepare cocktails, but they aren’t the competition we are trying to fight with. The convenience we give the user of having it on his or her smartphone beats all the websites that offer similar features. The other apps, TopShelf (iOS), Liquor Cabinet (iOS), Mixologist/MIxology (iOS/Android), Cocktail Flow (Android/ Windows), Drinks Master (AndroidopShelf (iOS))which help you prepare cocktails, with some basic features like adding notes to your cocktails, but none of these address the need of the people. What I saw through needfinding was that, people aren’t really interested in making fancy cocktails, but any form of drink mixed with alcohol that actually tastes good. The needfinding process armed us with the knowledge of what people want as well as need. So, we molded our application in a way that would appropriately help our users and well as provide them with a fun experience. Personas and Storyboarding (Week 3): I created one persona, and a few storyboards from this persona. I imagined the possible ways this app could help people have a better experience with alcohol. For instance, my friend Jessica proposed that she wants to find nearby people who are partying and might have a chance to go to the party through mobile application. Now, based on information like this, we come up with different scenarios under which the personas would make use of our app Parallel prototyping (Week 4): Our low-fi prototype features a navigation bar on the left side, which closes into an hamburger menu, unlike the permanent buttons on the bottom as in prototype 1. This will result in a cleaner look because there is not much space on a phone screen. In addition, this prototype used popup screens to ease user experience navigating through the application. Our low-fi prototype features a navigation bar on the left side, which closes into an hamburger menu, unlike the permanent buttons on the bottom as in prototype 1. This will result in a cleaner look because there is not much space on a phone screen. In addition, this prototype used popup screens to ease user experience navigating through the application. User Testing : Some ways we can solve the confusing navigation issues is to have consistent icon and naming at the top of each page that correlates with that ones on the sidebar. We might not need a sidebar, icons at the bottom or top of the screen may be able to suffice for navigation. Add a dedicated button for shaking instead of making the shake a mandatory thing to use features. Add a feature where users are able to put and see listings of parties. In the drinking buddies page, popup drink recipe on click on their favorite drink. Make the drink of the day sort of article the landing page for returning users. Make the user input ingredients when it is the first time using the app. Final prototype (Week 4) : Demonstration of the Fizzle prototype.The second button with the glass icon is the browse drinks page where users are able to discover new drink recipes and filter results by their saved favorites. Favoriting a drink will darken the heart icon to notify the user that the drink has been added to their favorites.The button with the crate icon is where the user manages his or her inventory, easily adding items with an auto complete drop down search bar for ease of use. New users land on this page to setup their inventory that is essential for the application. This helps the user experience so that he or she does not have to wander around the app the figure out how to use it. The fourth button with people as the icon represents the find buddies page and the last one features the edit profile and logout options. The user is able to toggle if he or she wants to be visible to other people in the find buddies and the send message feature has a popup confirmation box to reassure user experience.Overall, our thoughts behind designing this prototype involved thinking deeply about simplistic design and a comforting user experience. The Final Product : Fizzle, an app designed to make the drinking experience enjoyable from the start. Drinks now come down easy, while making new friends. My work and my learning: As the main software developer, my main goal is to create the app as close to our prototype design as possible. It seems a very daunting task at the start, given the little time we have left. We could have taken the easy route to use software to photoshop the features but as a computer science students, I can not let that pride go. Instead, I lead the team to create an actual application to show off our hard work. After writing 5000 lines of work within 5 days, Fizzle finally became a real world application, not just a design fantasy.