PROEJCT SCOPE
This project was completed during my summer internship, helping IUPUI professors design and realise their ideas. The professor assigned to our team came from visual communication department, and he wanted us to design and develop a tool that can help him communicate words in colors and designs.
PRODUCT RESEARCH AND DESIGN
Mostly people use keyboards to generate words in computer, since the professor want to translate words, we decided to design a tool that users can "type" their designs. After doing the Competitive Analysis of existing apps/software/websites, we found that although there are a lot of graphic design tools (like Photoshop, Patterno, Hexels Pro), none of them uses keyboard to design. Since typing is a quick and easy tool and involves with almost no learning curve, we would like to give it a try and see if it can be used to help users do a quick-and-simple design. In order to validate the tool, our team decided to prototype and test it.
PROTOTYPING
Language: HTML + CSS + JavaScript
Platform: Google chrome
With the virtual keyboard, users can input text in the text area with mouse clicks
With the color picker, users can assign their preferred color for each letter
With text box and color panel, users can convert the texts they’ve inputted into corresponding color blocks, so that they can produce a design by manipulating the position and content of their texts.
With save button, users can save both their texts and color designs into a PDF document.
USER TESTING
Positive feedbacks
The interface is concise and clear
Quick, simple, easy, immediate, creative
Kids would have fun to play with it
Good for exploring color combination, doing a 5-minute book/card design
It’s interesting to use
Negative feedbacks
Some format bugs make it hard to design
Design will be lost once the browser is closed accidently
Saving page is not what user would expect, and no feedback after saving successfully
User would always forget to input a return for each line
Repeated work is boring, copy and paste is not easy
There is no way to go back to previous color
Changing colors for multiple letters is troublesome - involving open and close frequently
It’s confusing to change color for a new user - button is mostly clicked
It’s hard to recognize the position for the color blocks
