Granny Talks

A chat app for my grandparents

Client

School Project

Course

INST711: Interaction Design Studio

Timeline

Fall Semester '21

Tools used

MarvelPOP and Figma

Project Description:

Create an application that you personally would find useful in your own life. Not large interventions - no uber for cats - but small, private applications, not intended for more than six to twenty users, including you.
‍
Identify key components that should be made reusable, and, using color, fonts, and other visual design cues, make yourself a component kit that could be used on either laptop or mobile.

Initial Ideation

The app is a messaging app focused on the needs of my family and friends. The main feature of this app is to use icons with text so that my grandparents can understand all icons and don’t confuse them with something that the icon doesn’t do. In addition to this, the time zone on each chat includes both the sender and the receiver's time zone. All contacts are invited to a group call at a particular time of the week (family reunion). The emojis on this app will also be labeled in order to help my grandparents understand where to use which emoji. Voice to audio conversion and vice-versa will be built inside the app in order to help make communication easier.

Desktop App Sketches

The initial idea of the project was to create desktop versions of the app and therefore I created some basic sketches for the desktop version and connected them with MarvelPOP for better understanding.

Mobile App

Next was to convert these rough sketches into mobile sketches. These sketches will be the base of our applications and will help us get an understanding of the information architecture that I was working on building.

Color

The colors were chosen while keeping in mind that this app was focused on the usage of my grandparents. Basic research on colors used by old people showed that colors like blue and green give out a positive feeling to them. A set of 5 gradient colors were designed and then shown to my grandparents who then chose the one that has been used as the primary color for the app.

Typography

Roboto makes for a more natural reading rhythm more commonly found in humanist and serif types. This makes it comfortable for users from any age category to read across and navigate through the app.

Final Screens