Experience website – Initial Ideas and wireframes
This week for Project 3 of Experience Website I focused on planning and coming up with design ideas. I started off in Miro by creating a mind map addressing the main points on the brief. This ensured that I didn’t miss out on any key information that I would have to address and it would be part of the design process from the very beginning. The notes that I took from last week when Rob went through the brief with us on the Thursday also ensured that I didn’t forget to do some extra research. From the last 3 weeks, I found that the amount of research I wanted to achieve would be hard to do in 1 week. As a result of this I have come to the conclusion that every design choice I make must have research throughout the whole process and not just for the initial ideas.
In my Miro board I addressed what I would want to include in my website, the pages, aim of the site, colour scheme, the images, text, processes, goals for the user, and my overall approach to the whole project from start to finish. Using images from existing websites I was able to draw arrows to exemplify what I meant as well as design ideas I liked. Each of these points branched off ideas that I came up with and included general information that I would include in my Experience website.
I took screenshots of two websites I liked the look of. One being a restaurant and the other being a website that sell hot air balloon experiences. These websites would be a similar feel and experience to my website, combining both the theme Food/Drink and audience Thrill-seekers. Also addressing similar target audience, being families and friends.
In my Miro board for this I included questions to ask my tutor, Rob for clarification on anything I was unsure about. I was unsure about if I wanted to add socials to the footer of the website, if it had to be an actual link to an instagram I’d have to create or just showing that it is a button that can be clicked on.
I then went into Figma and did a simple user flow of the website. I had to search up what a user flow would look like to ensure I was doing it correctly and tried my best to get process throughout the website. After creating about over half of the flow, I realised some processes were repeated and made the user flow look busy and crowded. I then took it upon myself to separate the booking process and add arrows from each step that lead to the 1 booking process, instead of different routes containing their individual booking process, repeated. These screenshots shows the difference and show that I added notes to the user flow, being that at any point by clicking on the logotype, you can go back to the home page.
I also started creating wireframes on Figma for the desktop version of my website. I struggled slightly with getting to grips with creating the wireframes as I wasn’t too certain on where I would want to place my images and text. I have kept it quite simple, however I am hoping to create more and develop these further next week. Overall my favourite part of this weeks design idea generating was creating the mind map in Miro as I was able to come up with lots of possibilities and ideas.