About the project
As part of my master’s degree, I designed and developed a mobile app. The unit was designed to cater to the evolving landscape of the digital era, where apps have become integral to our daily lives, influencing how we communicate, work, and entertain ourselves. We were exposed to cutting-edge technologies, industry best practices, and the latest design trends, equipping you with the skills and knowledge needed to thrive in the competitive app development field. I chose to create a news app that focused on the subject of music.
Aims of the project
This app aims to create an informative and entertaining news platform based on the subject of music. The main focus of the app will be ‘urban’ music such as Hip-Hop, R&B and Rap, however, it will also cater for some of the other popular music genres such as pop and grime and also include events such as the Grammys, MOBOs etc. The reason for creating this app was because there are many music apps that have news as a part of the app, but not as the main focus, so creating this app will give people a platform dedicated to the latest music news.
Planning and Initial Designs
After doing some primary and secondary research, I then went on to create the designs and user flows. I created wireframe designs of all the pages and their layouts. Using these I created initial designs for some pages, then got feedback from people within the target audience and adjusted the designs to what the users felt would improve the overall experience of the app.
I went through various iterations of names, logos and colour schemes and received feedback on them before settling on a design. Below you can see the logo and colour scheme that was picked for the app:
Final Design and Screens
I started with the landing page and main page (which shows general news articles) and then a page showing the news article itself.
After creating the news & article pages, I repurposed these to develop the majority of the other pages for my app, as they follow similar layouts and structures with slightly different designs depending on the content being shown.
Once those were created, the final few pages to design were the ‘albums’ page and the search and profile pages. These were done last as they follow a different design compared to the rest of the pages.
Submission
Once the app was designed, a prototype was coded and packaged using PhoneGap to turn my code into a functional app that could be used on certain mobile devices, this was then handed in along with my research, testing and documentation.