Plan Ahead is an app designed for Damiera Cruz, a college student who suffered a traumatic brain injury leading to heightened photosensitivity and audiosensitivity. This leads to headaches and other unpleasant effects when using mainstream productivity and calendar apps, which are cluttered and highly colorful. In the summer program “Design the Future”, I designed an app that combined calendar, quick-note, and to-do list functionality in a simple, uncluttered interface, enabling Ms. Cruz to organize her life in a comfortable way.
We interviewed Damiera to find out what she needed from our design.
Notes from further interviews.
We used “mad lib” exercises to codify the information gained from interviews.
We laid out some rough designs and asked Damiera for feedback. We iterated several times on the original design to make the visual appearance cleaner and the functionality more intuitive.
We then translated our app flow and wireframe into Adalo, an app-building software, to create a functional prototype for Damiera to use.
I can happily say that Damiera did prefer the experience of using our app to the mainstream.