A Tiny Redesign

After many introductory lessons for the past couple of weeks, our class has finally started the exciting process of beginning to make our first designs together. Well, for this week, I guess I should say re-designs. This has been, without doubt, my favorite activity we have done yet, since we actually got to implement practically what we have been talking about theoretically. It was, admittedly, a tiny redesign, but I was absolutely brimming with ideas for the simple prompt we were given.
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The assignment tasked us with redesigning a pop-up dialogue built in an app to adjust settings for tracking companies and their financials. There were options for the user to add the company to their portfolio, get email alerts, and every combination in between. Surprisingly enough, the original design wasn't bad. It was quite functional! However, a design that is not bad does not necessarily make it a good design. There definitely were good design features, such as selection constraints and clear instructions, but it was overly-logical, overwhelming, and needed to be more dynamic. To improve the design, I reduced the word count significantly to minimize the need for reading and maximized the requirement of the human eye's fovea (what we use to bring things into focus and blur everything else out). In my redesign, the selections would change colors or would trigger a new selection to pulse based on choices made in order to draw the eye to each necessary, sequential step.

My new design probably was not a perfect, but it is also likely that no design truly ever is perfect. The point of UX is to always believe in the necessity of continued design iterations to improve technology for the sake of humanity. Indeed, I was proud of my work as I was sure I had just made changes that would actually improve the human experience with a technology if it were a real-world scenario.