Navigation App-Design

2019 • 4 months • 3 designers

In 2018 the Institute for Art in Public Space Graz approached the FH JOANNEUM for a navigation app. The idea was to build an app that guides you to all the different pieces of public art in Graz and Styria and shows you further information about the artist and his work. I took this work on with a team and within a few months of work we had a prototype ready for handover to the development.

Back and forth

In the beginning there were so many ideas floating around so we had to break it down to the core idea of the app and find the MVP. We presented them some use cases that hat to work with the finished app. After they were happy with that we built a lo-fi prototype to get the workflow right. After that we presented them some ideas for the visual design and branding which led us to the final product you see here.

This was a student project and the learning curve was huge. Today I would design it native for Android or iOS or use Material Design or Human Interface Guidelines, something we just didn't know back then.

What we learned:

• Be prepared for long words and names when designing in German.
• Cutting the UX-phase short will get you in the end.
• Start small. Find the essence of the app and make that work. Everything else can wait.
• You can't seperate the design-phase and the development-phase completely.
• "Be bold with your design" means different things for different people.
• Prototypes get huge quickly. Symbols and components make your life easy.