Mariana
Gonzales Vigil D.
Product and Graphic Designer, Passionate Moviegoer!
I’ve been the creative one since school. I always knew my path was going to be somehow related to design. Exploring illustrator and photoshop were some of my fun afternoons after school. I started my studies back in 2011 doing a bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design. I felt it needed some complementing, so I did an interdisciplinary diploma in Visual Merchandising. I graduated in 2015 and 2016, respectively. Eventually, those two helped me get my first important job involving both Marketing and Graphic Design. This job gave me more than 5 years of experience in the professional world and connected me with brands I wouldn’t have imagined working with.
The pandemic came and with it the need for new experiences. I consider myself to be quite an introvert, but even for introverts these last two years of isolation and lack of social interactions were a bit too much. With it, I saw a great opportunity, an important development in Digital Product Design, and I wanted to be part of it. Then came the adventure, moving to a new country I had never even visited before. I got accepted to Sheridan College, got my visa approved, and my fiancé and I grabbed our cats, packed two bags, and moved toward this new adventure.
Exploring Fidelity
The task to solve was to explore one app that we usually use and identify a feature or flow that could work better or add something that the app doesn’t already have. In this case, I chose to work on a specific feature Spotify has which is the ability to create personalized playlists. In my case, my type of social gathering is usually a close friend’s barbeque and I tend to create the playlists. I know what type of music my friends and I like to listen to, Latin music with a mix of pop culture English songs that attract 90’s nostalgia so the barbeques tend to finish as a sing-along type of event.
Currently, the app doesn’t allow me to choose from those genres as suggested song filters when creating a playlist, and the usual “created for you” playlists are mostly wrong. You can only search for specific artists or songs. This project focuses on how to optimize the process of creating a new playlist so users can have a better and more streamlined experience. This was an individual project, so I researched, designed, and created the new user flow and all of its screens.
A Gamified Learning Experience
For our capstone project, we got to work with Indus Space, our industry partner. This was a group project. My role inside the group was the decider, and some of the tasks that I developed were, research, user-flow, wireframe, and reporting.
The task we had was to create a way for kids between 6 and 18 years old to be more motivated and engaged in space learning. After profound research we concluded that we were going to focus on the early years, children between 6 and 11 years old. In this case, we weren’t going to be able to interview or test our main audience, so we went through several interviews with parents and teachers instead. The results we got from these interviews started our journey through the construction of a gamified learning experience. An app designed for kids in which they will be able to learn through an interactive gaming experience.
We put our focus on creating a streamlined sign-up process so parents could create their kids' users, connect them with their class code if they had one, or just sign them up for their grade-level learning. After that, the kids will experience creating their own avatar to their liking and starting with the experience. They will be able to choose from different topics and games within them. After successfully finishing each level they will end rewards that will let them choose different features to add to their avatar. This whole experience was designed so kids wouldn't need the help from their parents or teachers on their side to explain more, everything is in-app.
After our 3 rounds of testing and iterations, we good great feedback stating this would be a really good app for children to learn and both parents and teachers would recommend using it.