A few things have happened since the last post.

1) I completed the Intro to UI/UX course. It felt a little weird not going to class last Saturday after doing it for six weeks, but I will say it was nice to sleep in a bit.

2) I went a little too far with the final project. Classmates of mine completed three screens of a high-fidelity prototype and I ended up doing much more than that. You’ll see this in an upcoming post.

With all of that said, let’s take it back to the third week in the course.

Remember Taylor, one of the user personas? I chose to use her as the main character for this storyboard. She’s a coffee shop owner who is very outgoing and personable, but doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to taking care of plants. There’s a lot on her plate and she can sometimes forget to give the leafy friends in her shop some water. She wants to be better, especially since she’s killed four plants in the span of a few months.

Side Note: No, I am not Taylor. I don’t own any plants in real life, however I do have virtual plants that I DO remember to water. The Viridi app plays very calming music and it’s a nice way to de-stress after a long night at work. But that’s not the point here.

While I sketched out the basics of this storyboard below, it’s very clear that I wasn’t going to turn in that piece of paper because 1) notes are all over the place and 2) my sketches are not the best.

Frame by frame. Again, I’m not an artist.

And so, I made it much more legible with the help of a few resources. I found out that you can create your own text messages for free online with a generator, complete with contact information and time stamps! Now while I have heard about people faking text messages on social media, I hadn’t done it before this project, and I would never actually use it in my daily life to fool anyone. (Use the powers for good, not evil.) Once all of the info is filled out, you can save the messages as a JPG or GIF to mimic real time texting. That’s how I got the first two frames.

The third frame is actually a mix of a mock-up and the original launch screen from last year’s Green Thumb project - the one with three screens. I quickly put together a search screen for the fourth frame, and the fifth frame was also the plant details screen from last year’s project. I figured it was best to put those images to use since they were going to be redesigned anyway.

The good creators at Pexels provided me with a very awesome stock image to use to show plants in a coffee shop, because I sure did not have any sort of time to go to a coffee shop myself and take pictures of plants. I would have liked to, but the way my schedule was set up at work didn’t give me a lot of time to do so.

Another step in the process has been completed!