I mentioned in the Green Thumb Storyboard post that I went too far with the mockup, compared to my classmates. At the beginning of the Intro to UI/UX course, we were told that we could either recreate an existing app or website or create one from scratch as the project we would work on over 6 weeks. I chose to do a little bit of both.

I have mentioned Green Thumb. It’s even listed as a project here, but I’m not going to sugarcoat anything. That first version is not my best work. There are only three screens and it doesn’t show how a user would navigate through the app. I wanted to revise it and this was the perfect chance to do so.

With that said, I was up to my knees in it. MY KNEES.

I am my own worst critic. Every wireframe I created reminded me that I needed to add in another feature. It got to the point where I was making user profiles for people other than my two personas and had screens for a Privacy Policy as well as the app’s Terms and Conditions.

Case in point: I didn’t use any of these user profiles in the end.

Yet somehow it didn’t hit me until I had to do a full fledged mockup and I was staring at a total of 60-something screens in InVision.

You read that correctly. No, I’m not exaggerating.

InVision is easy to navigate, but up until that point, I had only used it for projects that had less than 6 screens. I bit off more than I could chew. It was time to decide what should stay in the app and what should go.

Just because something looks fine in the little preview window in Adobe XD, doesn’t mean that it’s going to translate well in another program. Sometimes your design just isn’t working at all and it’s best to let it go. I learned that quickly when I realized that I had to increase the length of all of my article screens (like the first shown in the image above) in order to make it scroll as if you were actually reading an article. Also, I may or may not have done a lot of research AND translated articles into my own words.

I wanted to make a questionnaire as part of the onboarding process to match users with a mentor or mentee and I thought that having a photographic background would be a great idea. No. It wasn’t. My instructor told me that it could actually be an accessibility issue, due to how difficult it was to read the text against it. I ended up scrapping that idea all together and just went with a plain white background.

While I wanted to have users click through the multiple choice answers and even fiddled around with it, I found that it just increased the number of the screens I had. I figured I would just use ProtoPie to do that, but let me tell you, ProtoPie takes a ton of time from you when you have as many screens as I did. I got to the third screen and knew that I wouldn’t be able to complete it in the time frame that I wanted to. In the end, I made the decision to put that idea on ice.

I struggled a bit with ProtoPie and relied on more than a few help articles, but I think that’s normal when you’re using software that you haven’t used before. Again, with more time and practice, I think that it wouldn’t be as daunting to me as it was.