In the first couple of weeks of Creative Incubator we met the rest of our team and Heather introduced us to the meaning of Silience:
…the kind of unnoticed excellence that carries on around you every day, unremarkably—the hidden talents of friends and coworkers, the fleeting solos of subway buskers, the slapdash eloquence of anonymous users, the unseen portfolios of aspiring artists—which would be renowned as masterpieces if only they’d been appraised by the cartel of popular taste, who assume that brilliance is a rare and precious quality, accidentally overlooking buried jewels that may not be flawless but are still somehow perfect.
jkcreative (2014) The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows Available at: http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/49792543182/silience (Accessed 6/03/19)
I feel, as a whole, the idea that we have generated for the Silience app is very good, this is something that has never been developed before and if pursued, could easily be taken to market. The app and digital campaign works really well with the definition. The Word of the Day gives a place for people with hidden talents to spark their creativity, or those who have creative minds to have a place to take 5 minutes out of their day for a mindfulness activity. The profile gives the user a place to display their creativity as well as view other user’s projects and see their own progress with the Word of the Day.
Creatively, we wanted the Silience app to look simple in it’s design in order that the users could customise their Profile and Calendar, so it feels more personal to them. Although the final product does not look exactly the same as the mock-up designs I produced, I feel with more time we could make the app more user friendly as well as include the extra features we had. For example, the social media aspect allowed users to interact with each others profiles and having local events advertised on the calendar.
The colours used work really well with the design, not overwhelming the user, but allowing us to highlight the important areas to draw the user’s eyes, for example, buttons and menu options. Adding the home page to the app allows for a place for the user to view their current project schedule, view the Word of the Day and check how many projects they are currently working on. Including this aspect halfway through the module after user testing, was one of the key changes for the app.
Technically, the Silience app excels in the way it tracks the users projects and populates these in the Calendar. This also allows the user to view how many projects they have in the ‘Work in Progress’, ‘Featured Projects’ and ‘Completed Projects’ through the homepage. As well as this having the scrollable calendar which highlights the start and end dates of each project make it very user friendly and familiar due to the similarities in the inbuilt Apple Calendar app. If the app was to be developed further, I feel we could improve on a number of additional usability issues for example, the filter is not very obvious on the Calendar page, which could be changed to the design from the Mock-up.
Overall, the Silience app contributes really well to the Digital Campaign as a whole. We made sure that the same colour scheme was used throughout, as well as keeping the same typeface. This was helped by creating brand guidelines so we all knew which colours to use, as well as typefaces, buttons, logos and background. The videos produced highlighted the need for the Silience app in the day to day life, with a clever storyline to make users realise that they need the Silience app. As well as this, the instagram account (@silienceeapp) builds interest in the app, to draw users in before we release the app to the App Store.
I feel that although at this point, the Silience app could not be released to the App Store. However if we spent 2-3 months in further development, we would have a finished product that would be ready for market.
