A brief summary of the business / site goals. What problems are you trying to solve? What is the purpose of the app?
I’m creating a web (and later, mobile) app that allows people to keep track of and catalog their entertainment media, such as books, DVDs, CDs and video games.
The key users. Describe behaviors, expectation, knowledge, or other characteristics.
- People with large collections of items
- People with rare or irreplaceable items
- People looking to show off or share their collections
- People who want to know the value of the items within their collection, either to trade-in or to sell
Scenarios in which your app or site will be used. These should be short narratives of the above users with your app / site.
- People with large collections of items will be able to use the site to find something to read, watch, listen to or play by filtering their items by genre, actor, artist etc, or perhaps even have the app suggest an item at random, to make the process more interactive and fun - a way to conquer their collection
- People with rare or irreplaceable items (and probably those with large collections also) will be able to use the site to keep track of all of their items, either for insurance purposes should the worst happen, or if they are lending items out
- People will be able to share their collections (or subsets of their collections) with friends to show off or to compare, or to initiate trading and lending amongst their friends
- People will be able to value their items, so that they can get an idea of the going rate for items individually (good for rarer items), or perhaps their entire collection, ideally both as a trade-in value with a store such as Amazon, or on the personal market like on eBay
Design principles to follow. These are style guidelines for the qualities or characteristics you’d like the design to follow
I’d probably start by saying what I want to avoid - I’m not keen on the skeuomorphic design a lot of apps similar to this use, representing someone’s actual bookcase or storage in an app. I’d like the focus to be on the items themselves, not a virtual library or bookshelf.
I’d like the design really to allow the user to “drill-down” into their collection, so perhaps starting with their collection grouped (by genre, media type or something like that), and then allowing them to drill-down into that and filter it to find what they are looking for, rather than presenting all of their items. Ideally at each step of the way when trying to find something, I’d look to present the minimum amount of interface necessary to further filter or search the collection, so as not to overwhelm the user especially when they have bigger collections.
I don’t have much else to go on in the way of sketches at the minute - I do have this landing page though with some initial design work from quite a while back (as you can see from the copy, this project has been on the backburner for a little while!).
Sorry for the delay in putting this brief up, I was busier than I thought I’d be with client work last couple of weeks. I’m based in the UK so the office hours are a little trickier for me as it’s early evening, but I will do what I can to drop in, and I’ll be catching up on the videos this weekend.