Tuesday Dog

As the capstone project for my IDS program in computing and design at the University of Georgia, I designed and developed a social media app, Tuesday Dog, that lets users draw and post drawings for other people to see and comment on, as well as browse others’ drawings. This project combined my knowledge of design and of computing in a full stack project.
The project consisted of me and a backend developer. I worked on the UX of the app as well as the design and the front end implementation.

Design

The first step of starting this project was to do research. In order to make this application successful I looked at existing applications that would have similar functions. What I found was there were many apps that focused on drawing but lacked any social aspects, so I decided to focus on social functions in the design.

I moved onto creating user flows, sketching, and wireframing what the app would look like, and then onto more realized mockups and a prototype.

For the Drawing I decided to only give users a simple and limited toolset, so thier drawings would stay on the simple side, like something you would draw on a sticky note.

As for viewing drawings, I wanted to keep to the feel of looking at sticky notes so I tried to fit more drawings onto the feed by having two columns with the option to quickly switch to a more compact 3 column view.

for the weekly feed iIwanted to keep it simple, so I made it identicle to the regular feed except for a timer that shows the time until tuesday, last weeks theme and the most liked drawing last week, and the current theme if it is tuesday.

Once mockups and a prototype were created I conducted A/B testing by sending out surveys to potential users, and used the information I got back to adjust my designs. Ideally I would have repeated this testing process multiple times as an agile design process but due to time constraints I chose to move on.

Development

In order to hasten development I decided to scale back the designs to be only essential features
For front end development I used Reactnative. Since this was the first project where I’ve used Reactnative, I had to learn it while I was developing the project. I found that it had a lot of similarities to what I was used to working with in web development enviroment, but had certain expectations of how apps were developed.
To make development faster I integrated Google sign and Pixi Js to take implement accounts and the drawing itself
Working with a backend developer I called HTTP methods to hook into our backend.
Tuesday Dog is still a work in progress.