I fairly drastically altered my project this week and rethought my ideas – and although this gave me a lot of extra work to do, it paid off and I am much happier with the state of my project and prototypes now.
On Monday, Jonny Gibson from Wondermake was in the studio to talk to us about his creative process when building websites, and to discuss our ideas with us. At the start of this week, I was feeling quite stuck with my low-fidelity prototype and unsatisfied with my rate of progress. The idea, the experience and the website structure felt boring to me and I was uninspired.
After talking to Jonny about this and discussing some ideas, I made some notes and bullet points of specific things I wanted my experience to be that I could centre the design around, to give the idea more purpose and intention.
I made a new plan for each page’s content, a new user flow diagram and new wireframe sketches. There would now be three main navigation pages instead of four: Home, Experience (About), and Book – removing ‘Location’, as I decided it would be more interesting to integrate it into the Experience page as a small section. All of these sketches on this Miro frame can be seen on my board in detail here.
With new ideas, wireframes and a structure I felt more confident with, I did another low-fidelity prototype in Figma which would go on to form the base of my high-fidelity prototype.
To make my experience more exciting, the website would now highlight more of the thrill aspect which helps with being able to design a stronger brand identity that makes the site feel less generic.
Having completed the low-fidelity prototype, I did some further visual research in addition to the still relevant boards I had already done. I focused on imagery and colours around ‘thrill’ and general high intensity activities. I colour picked a number of samples from the images into a palette presented in Figma to summarise some of the key colours found – this would help decide how the brand should look.
Finally, in the latter part of the week, having completed my new low-fidelity prototype and started thinking about branding, I began high-fidelity.
I started with adding some images and applying the fonts and brand colours I am currently working with, and writing some copy to make the site feel real (with the help of ChatGPT for some).
I focused on completing the first iteration of the home page next (above) – I will go back to this and make improvements and tweaks while/after doing the other pages. Next week, I want to finish my high-fidelity mobile wireframe and start considering the desktop site and Framer. I also want to work more on Project 4 – this week considering the unexpected volume of work I gave myself I put Project 4 to one side – so I would like to return to it and begin some research.