Glow Android prototype

A prototype of an Android application called Glow was created in the one-year long course "Explorative Design". The demand of the project was to find an idea for an app using Vienna’s Open Government Data. In a group of three students with six different ideas, my idea was chosen and first tested with FieldTest, then designed with Photoshop and Sencha.

The aim of Glow is to express and share your feelings based on your location. You can set Glows by taking pictures of people and things that move you in an emotional way and describe the intensity of your feeling, be it positive or negative. By gathering all Glows from your area, the app creates an emotional map of the city and gives insights which part of the city their inhabitans like or dislike, what they appreciate about it, where they like to spend their time and which areas they prefer to avoid.

At the beginning was a long phase of evaluating design concepts and ideas by sketching and doing storyboards. Consideration was given to how the intensity could be conveyed best on a smartphone.

Different user interface designs were transformed into paper prototypes and evaluated using mockups and Interaction Sketch videos.

The combination of the browser based FieldTest application and pixel perfect screenshots allowed to test the smoothness of the interaction on a smartphone.

The basic idea is to take a picture of something of your liking in your current location and then tag it with a mood. This can be done by moving a little sun across the screen which will influence the mood embodied by a smiley and colors. The horizontal axis of the screen influences the level of excitement, symbolized by the saturation of the color, whereas the vertical axis influences the level of happiness with varying colors. A commentary can be added to give further hints for this special feeling. The picture is then saved as a Glow on the particular location and can be seen as normal version or as emotionalized image with the color chosen by its photographer.

All Glows, except those set to private, will show up on the Glow map allowing to get a feeling for the area where you are currently walking around.