Brave Space

Woah! that was a big prompt. The Screaming Emus, my team, jumped right into a Zoom meeting to talk about our first few ideas. Collectively we felt as a group of three very privileged people that coming up with a genuine and worthwhile solution in three days was going to be very difficult. Particularly knowing we would need to balance between our classwork and putting time into the design jam. Which is ultimately what led us to say "There must be organizations out there better equipped and actively working to address a lot of these issues." How did people go about finding these types of organizations and communities? How did they get the funding they needed? That was really when the seed of our idea was formed.

For our research we primarily talked with close friends about some of their experiences they'd had while trying to either break into a creative industry or establish themselves as a creative. We also found existing organizations and events online that helped us understand what was currently available and how our project could theoretically connect with the existing resources. We each found multiple organizations to discuss with each other. One example I connected with was Sporas, which is a platform for cinematographers and film technicians of color working to create a more inclusive film industry. Keeping these organizations in mind as we continued into the design process really helped shape some of our decisions.

Once our team had an idea of what our app was going to be about we decided to work separately and get back together on Zoom the next morning with some sketches. When I'm sketching I like to make sure I'm thinking through how a user would go about a task. I sort of make a user flow at the same time as my sketches. I start with the core task of an app, the "What's the point of making this app?" For Brave Space I started with a home screen and then built each screen needed to get a user to a certain goal. Then started the sketching process again with the second most important task.
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Our group walked each other through our ideas and sketches. Together we picked the best bits and combined them into what we would use to build our initial wireframe. Our idea was looking pretty sweet when we brought our sketches together so we got to work making wireframes in Adobe Xd. We connected our wireframes up into a simple prototype and we were able to easily see some of the gaps in our flow. I worked on adding a few more screens to the low fidelity prototype as my team members did some initial visual design.

This was everyone's first jam of any kind and time sure sneaks by really fast. We got a medium fidelity prototype done around 8pm. We asked some of our family members, "Heeeeyyy do you think I could test another prototype with you?" With their testing of the prototype we were able to change some things we had definitely been overlooking.
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With our deadline fast approaching and it being a little too late in the night to get more users to test, our best course of action was to push our prototype to the high fidelity the Jam was expecting of the teams. I ended up working on adding motion to our prototype while my other partner brought all our colors into a homogenous look.
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We knew since day one of this Jam that we wanted to leave at least an hour before the deadline to make sure to get everything turned in properly, so that's what we did. Two hours before the deadline I sent a prototype to my father to proofread, make sure the connections worked, and just see if the app made any sense to someone that had a full night of sleep. I'm glad we did cause he was able to catch some typos and other small errors that we were able to adjust before we hit submit and turned our prototype in before the deadline.