Slate

Introduction

Project Slate, was a project in my Junior year of the Interactive Media design program. Our assignment was to take an email service, analyze it’s pros/cons, and find a way to create a new and better application from it. From this, my groupd and I designed Slate, a social media aggregator.

Design

The purpose of Slate was to become the one stop for all things social media. We wanted to create an application for both mobile and PC platforms which simplifies the social media experience. Instead of jumping from one application(ex. Facebook, Intagram etc.) to another, Slate keeps all accounts together under one application. The benefit for the user is simplicity and saved time because there would be no need to constantly jump between applications. Another added benefit is saved storage space on a phone because the user wouldn’t have to install every separate application.

Pitfalls and challenges

One of our challenges were the mechanics of the mass messaging. We tried to make it as fluid and intuitive as possible. The picture shown above shows the basic functionalities of Slate. The user can compose the message they want to send, select the users they want to send it to, then drag the message “bubble” to the pool of users to send out a mass text message.

Something we had to consider in this app design was the staggering amount of social media. There are so many different types of social media, that it was difficult to stuff it all into one. We proposed that the default accounts built in would be email and Facebook since many users have these types of accounts already. If the user wants to add accounts, they may do so by adding it to the application. This was to allow the user to have the apps meaningful to them and not have empty unused accounts. I proposed this idea because my Android phone had Twitter built in and couldn’t be deleted. This was frustrating because I didn’t have a Twitter app and didn’t intend on creating one.

One of the issues with the app was the idea itself. We conducted very light user research (which itself was in issue), but we learned that some users actually prefer to have each app separated. Having everything together seemed overwhelming for some users. Having a dedicated app for everything made it easier for users to focus on that particular social media account.

Conclusion

This project served as good experience in learning mobile app design. I had to consider constraints like screen size, and functionalities when focusing on a mobile platform rather than a desktop platform. This was also a great exercise for prototyping intuitive interfaces to try to make the mechanics of the application feel fluid and seamless.