My Design Journey
Introduction
Hi! I’m Oroni. While I majored in computer science and most of my interships and courses are related to software development, I also specialized in human-computer interaction (HCI) and minored in psychology, so I have also been interested in the design process. I have always been a visual person with illustration as my lifetime hobby, so UI was what first interested me. I started playing around in Adobe XD and Figma back in second year and created some prototypes, familiarizing myself with the platforms and its tools. Later, in my last term of undergrad, I took an HCI course where we went through the entire UX design process to create a high-fidelity prototype of an app based on our own user resesarch. While my exposure to this field has been brief, I have enjoyed exploring how to create features and design choices that meet users’ needs, and I would be keen to learn more. Below I’ve listed some of my projects.
Chef 449
My HCI course allowed me to get hands-on experience with the UX process by working collaboratively within a team of four to create a high-fidelity prototype of an app featuring a personalized AI cooking assistant. Our goal was to create a smooth and user-friendly experience with this AI-assisted app through generating recipes based on ingredients and kitchenware the user already has while meeting the user’s dietary needs and restrictions. The app also aimed to customize recipe instructions based on the user’s skill-level. While going through the design process, we also kept a thorough documentation which included our value proposition, personas, user interviews, affinity diagram, empathy maps, reflections, story boards, feature brainstorming, peer critiques and design evaluations, prototype iterations, and more. My teammates and I wrote up this project portfolio that summarizes keypoints from the whole process, check it out! Chef 449 Blog
If you’d like to know more about any part of the process, feel free to reach out to me through LinkedIn or any of my emails listed below.
Some of my favourite parts in the process were conducting user interviews, coming up with features based on findings on our users, reflecting on our design and improving it, and creating graphics to make the app more visually appealing. It was fun to exercise my creativity and problem-solving when coming up with features and reflecting on our design, although we did not have to fully implement all the features we thought of. Take a look at the “Design Iteration” section in the project portfolio linked above for details on our design iterations.
Flower App
This was one of my first attempts at designing an app, which was meant to allow users to design their own flower bouquet which could then be delivered. It was still in its preliminary stages, before I researched design standards, but I thought it was a good start. Looking back, I appreciate the colours, fonts, and the simplicity in the main bouquet-building page. However, I noticed there are weaker pages such as the order history page or shipping page, which I think could use better layout, usability, and information: Prototype of Algernon