I've been scheduled to work even more hours now. It's not that I'm not used to working a lot of hours but it hasn't been what I intended. Reasons being I want to focus on my UX class and also me wanting to really build the foundations to apply for an interaction design internship. But you know, hard work does get paid off. I was recognized as partner of the quarter at my store. It's a nice little recognition before I embark on my journey transitioning into a new store that consists of a drive-thru. Things have been hectic and a little crazy but I am so loving the challenges.

In class today, we did a little bit of prototyping. Even though I come from a more visual design background, i found it rather awkward to start wireframing and prototyping. I'm still in the process of figuring out which tools and apps to use for my project. I've been testing out UXPin and right now I'm trying out InVision (in which I've actually seen a lot of people using). But I'm also mainly building the interfaces in Photoshop just because that's the one software I'm most familiar with. Wireframing and prototyping are more difficult that I thought. Not because I have no idea what they are but it requires you to really grasp onto the information you've gathered and see through the lens of a user.

Today, our in-class assignment was to build a prototype for a hypothetic mobile app, 'The Electric Shark' (no joke, the first thing that came to mind were the left and right sharks that appeared alongside Katy Perry at the Superbowl). Anyway, our goal was to redesign the interface of the app and also create a user flow that provides significant improvements. I looked at sites like Ticketmaster, Live Nation, Brown Paper Tickets, AXS, and even Virgin America for some competitive analysis. My favorite was Virgin America. The interface is so simple and clean. The color pops, too. And it provides real-time feedback in response to what you have just clicked.

I admit that I'm really a sucker for minimalistic designs and Virgin America's website was exactly that. It's a combination of functionality and good aesthetics. The links are right there in your face so that you really don't have to be spending the extra effort to find information.

Looking at several ticket-purchasing websites and apps, I've gathered some universal information that reoccurs on almost all of the aforementioned website and then sketched a quick user flow, and jumped right into sketching out some interfaces ideas in order to start my really raw wireframes! Below, you'll see the rough sketches I did during class time.

As you can see, I'm pretty terrible at sketching but I had fun trying out the different approaches to prototyping and wireframing. Next step, building an actual prototype!

Sleep..What?