Supervisor meeting with Simone 15/04/15

Today was the first meeting with Simone in about 4 weeks, as she was off for Easter for 2 weeks and prior to that I missed our last meeting because I had to go home.  I had sent her the draft sections of my dissertation which she had read some of.  The good news is, she is happy with most of what I have written (woohoo!) despite the fact that I am very over the word limit and I am not even finished drafting!  She gave me some notes on what she has read so far and we have another meeting on Friday to go over the rest of what she has read.  I had planned to blitz on and get the rest of the Contextual Review finished up today, but I was ill after lunch so it has not been a hugely productive afternoon.

In other news, a friend of mine who took the survey and viewed the prototype very kindly lent me his old iPad 3 to test on in order to help the design process, which was very kind and will hopefully help this last bit of cleaning up the UI as I will be able to see how it actually looks and feels, rather than relying on InvisionApp's simulator.  Speaking of this, Simone had a look through the prototype and voiced some opinions/concerns over navigation.  Once I am done with the current dissertation writing and editing, I am going to go in and change what needs changed/adapted.  This includes a re-ordering of some sections - we decided that exercises for mindfulness should be an option on the home page so that users would have a point of stickiness to return to the app again and again.  As you can see below, there is no direct route to this from the homepage on the current build.  It was also decided that the pale background would be the one to go for, as neither journalistic evidence nor the survey results established a definitive preference.  I wanted to give users the option to switch between a dark and light colour scheme, but Simone urged me to keep my workload to the essentials given that hand in is in almost 11 days (EEK).

Screen grab of "What Is Mindfulness?" page

We also discussed the idea of having users tap on buttons saying "Got it!" "Okay" etc as this will prompt them to read the text content and also make them feel like they are achieving goals, which directly relates to the application of flow theory in interactive design.  This is something I have written about previously and has emerged as something quite important to both practical and theoretical work, as well as being a help to the user experience design (and I need a lot of that!)