Adobe Creative Jam 2018

Sometime during early August, one of my friend posted an interesting post about participating a UIUX competition hosted by Adobe! Though she wasn’t participating the event, I was interested so I messaged her and decided to give a shot.

The whole event was great - my team won a 2nd place for people’s choice at that competition.

Please also check out the event blog post by Adobe and the photos for the event.

Live demo: Nudge

What is Adobe Creative Jams?

Creative Jams are series of event series inspiring talks by local creative professionals with a design competition - link. I participated the design competition where our team was given total of 3 hours to complete an App with a selective theme using Adobe XD.

The theme for this year’s competition was “Nudge.”

Competition

With a given theme, our team decided to first expand the idea of the word. What does nudging actually mean? Conceptually nudging could be anything that may be physical, such as light touch or push and also could mean something that is mentally as well. After brainstorming the conceptual definition of the word, we decided to investigate the diction term of the word.

nudge /nəj/ verb -

1. prod (someone) gently, typically with one's elbow, in order to draw their attention to something.

The part of the meaning that caught my attention was this part: “ … in order to draw their attention to something “

It was this part of the definition that we decided to develop more on. In terms of developing the song, we started by referencing a personal story of my first crush that I had in the past.

Back then, when I wanted to talk to someone outside my comfort zone (ex - my crush) it was always difficult to start a conversation. And I thought it would be great to find something that can help me start a conversation with an another person. It was this idea that was behind the motivation for the App as we thought creating an App to give a “Nudge” to start a conversation would be a great idea.

Brainstorm

The basic idea of the App is to help users to make friends and relationships through common interest. This helps users who are socially awkward or want to make more friends.

Hence, it was important to think about the different ways it could be possible for an App to give a nudge to the user. While we’ve came up with number of ideas for this problem, we decided to study the basic elements that creates a great conversation. As a result, we were able to come to the conclusion that the one of the important elements which helps the people to have a great conversation is common interest. Coming to this conclusion, it could determine that one of the most important functionality of the App would be able to figure out what kind of interests the user had so that it can use that data to give the user a nudge to start a conversation.

We also had to think about the different method that the App could nudge the users to start a conversation. We’ve thought of few ideas for this and the best one out of this was inevitably a notification.

Having these two basic functionality of the App figured out, next was to design the App.

Project

In terms of deciding the color scheme and the design language for the App, we thought that the color has to match and support the main objective of the App - help the user to build relationship. We decided to use a color that is not too strong, yet offers a friendly introduction to the users. We thought light pink was a good color choice to convey such meaning due to the friendliness and lightness of the color, also attractive to the many users as well. The HEX Code for the color was: #FAC0CB

App

We’ve decided to make this App as simple as possible: With only 3~4 main screens in total. Landing Page (for logins and sign ups) Home, and notifications that “Nudges” the users. After 3 hours, we were finally able to come up with solution and able to complete the App. I would like to share the App that we’ve created:

Conclusion

Working on this 3 hour time-limited UIUX Competition was definitely something that was challenging but worth doing. I learned quite a lot during those 3 hours, especially realized the importance behind the initial thought process and brainstorm before diving into any concept sketches and designs. Another thing that was grateful about the competition was that the competing team were from various backgrounds, some were already professionals designing app in the field. Being surrounded and competing with the actual working professionals offered many great insights in terms of the inspiration and the quality of the work. I was glad that I took part of this event - it was definitely rewarding.