Creating a desktop and mobile interface for a ficitional high-end furniture company.
*Disclaimer: This project was completed prior to my formal training and subsequent employemnt in UX Design.
With the ongoing COVID-19 situation, I found myself with enough time to work on improving my UI Design skills. To do this, I have been reading as much material I can to help educate myself on design fundamentals (especially Refactoring UI). The second thing I did was enroll in a Udemy course named "User Experience Design Essentials" taught by Daniel Walter Scott. Throughout the course, students are tasked with developing a prototype for "Maynooth Furniture", a fictional luxury furniture company. Students are provided a brief, a logo, and requirements for their designs.
The course was comprehensive and provided us with a brief, persona, and inspiration on how to proceed. Outside of this, the final outcomes such as wireframes and high fidelity designs are completely original.
As part of the class, online students are given a brief with all the necessary information such as objectives, audience, feature lists, costs, and timelines. This is a real-life brief used by the instructor Daniel Walter-Scott that was assembled for one of his clients.
Students in this course were also provided with a fictional persona based on the details provided in the brief. After consulting the brief and portfolio, I was starting to establish what kind of feel my brand and site should have. I knew the site needed a mature look that was able to deliver a sense of luxury and quality to any user who were to visit the online store. With this in mind, I started think of initial design decisions such as choosing a regal and luxurious colour scheme, while also redesigning the logo slightly to better reflect the information provided in the brief.
Wireframes were a project requirement for this course, and they done to give me a basic idea of how the site will be laid out. Adobe XD was used for this part of process but unlike my High-Fidelity designs, I restricted myself to using neutral colours, fonts, and placeholders. Instead, I emphasized spacing and core elements before finally linking the three pages using Adobe's prototyping functions. Prior to moving into High-Fidelity, I also distributed my prototypes to my friends and family to ensure that my navigation and layouts seemed logical and functional.
