Week 10 Supervisor Meeting with Simone

Today's supervisor meeting involved Simone going over my current methodology section with me, which turned out to be a lot more of a making chapter than anything!  At this point, I have written more about research which constitutes as part of a contextual review than a methodology, but I am ok with that as the section as is is at 2000 words - a little too wordy for what is supposed to be the shortest section of the dissertation.  Simone recommended two books - Art Practice as Research and another one about visualising data, the name of which I can't remember.  The writing side of things will come together more when I start working on my literature review next week.

When showing Simone my work, I got some really good feedback and pointers on the design of the navigation system.  At present, I have designed an interface which is pretty basic and relies on little icons on the corner to take the user to either the homepage, the starting point for the brain, or the starting point for the body.  (See this in an upcoming post - I've been keeping my work to myself again, oops!). While talking to her about it we both realised I had no breadcrumbs system in place to tell the user where they were in the whole system, so that's something to fix ASAP.  Simone pointed out that if I was planning to use an Apple device for my showcase, I should follow the way Apple's operating system is designed as many iOS apps mimic Apple's own design.   She showed me the style of menus used both by Apple and apps run on them, such as Spotify and Ebay.  From looking at these I could glean that the accordion style of menu which pops out from a subtle hamburger icon, as well as where the simple navigation buttons were placed.  This is an extra something to iterate for next week.

I showed Simone my work from the past week, explaining how each broader section was sorted into a topic (for example, mindfulness and mental health is currently one page) and how that leads to a new modal window which goes into each section of that page in more depth.  In some places, I thought about having scrolling implemented so that the process pages (the how-to exercises and so on) but after discussing it with Simone and taking into account literature studies in reading about page vs. screen learning, I decided to keep the style consistent and have single-screen windows which centre around an illustration.

An important decision which was made during this meeting was to use a darkened background in a modal window.  Between Simone wanting to consider the element of "switching off" in the design of the app, and supporting literature against the case for on-screen reading as the brightness hurts the eyes, the "dimmed" look is my current choice for the modal windows.

For next week I am aiming to have a more solid idea of questions to ask in my survey - there are 6 weeks left, I need to get it sorted!