This blogpost reflects on the final stage of RI1 as well as how I think the rapid ideation went as a whole. Click here for a midpoint reflection.

I have followed the GIBBS reflective method for this blogpost (cited in The University of Edinburgh) you can learn more about it here.

✅ Description

Producing the figma prototype and finishing off RI1 ended up being a bit mad as I had to take care of my father who had gone for emergency surgery right in the middle of the build phase. This greatly impact how much time I had left to produce the work and also affected my decision, choosing in the end to follow a less technically challenging route and creating the Inner Life idea so that I would still have something to present to the group.

The actual prototype was built in a single very long day and I even managed to create the accompanying video though this was done in the last 15 minutes and therefore was not as polished as I would’ve liked.

Almost immediately when I started and saw my initially planned screens you can see below (Figure 1) I realised that my initial wireframing idea was far too complex for the time I had.

Fig. 1: Sarah Gomes Munro 2023. Original app wireframe plan.

The time restraint actually meant that I simplified the overall app and found that my landing page could combine a few features I had initially intended to keep separately. I took it back to my sketchbook where I could more easily work through the bones until I had a workable idea. I am still aware that these sketches make sense to me but are hard for someone else to understand, they would not be acceptable as deliverables if they had to communicate an idea to a wider group. Click on the images to inspect them further.

Fig. 2: Sarah Gomes Munro 2023. Simplify 1.

Fig. 3: Sarah Gomes Munro: 2023. Simplify 2.

Fig. 4: Sarah Gomes Munro 2023. Simplify 3.

Fig. 5: Sarah Gomes Munro: 2023. Simplify 4.

The actual build on Figma was quite streamlined and very focused. I had previously in the sprint watched the Figma Fundamentals course on Linkedin Learning so that I would have a basic idea of how it worked and I delved into youtube and the Figma help centre throughout the day to figure out problems. I was only defeated by not having enough time to figure out hover and selected states for buttons. This isn’t too disastrous as they weren’t crucial to the functionality of the prototype and a phone app doesn’t have hover states anyway, but I had to frankenstein the selected states of some buttons for the sake of the prototype demonstration which I would have preferred to build properly.

The 2 minute video we were asked to create to present our work ended up being about 3.30 as I was only able to complete it 15 minutes before the deadline and didn’t have time to refine it. I didn’t think I would have time for it at all with everything else going on and Carlos had told me that I would be able to share my screen and share my prototype like that if needs be, but I thought that the video would be preferable as if I walked people through the prototype on my machine it could take too long.