Project 2
SKETCH
DESIGN
DEVELOP
Style-to-Unlock
For the second project, we were tasked with sketching, designing & implementing an animated touch-based interface that would be an alternative to the classic 'slide to unlock' most mobile phones use.
The first part of our project required us to develop an interface based on a gesture or multi-touch input. After several rounds of concept sketching, brainstorming, developing variations and of course coding, my group and I created Style-to-Unlock.
Part 1
The Concept Sketches
In the sketches below you can clearly see our team struggle to develop novel ideas. We wanted it all: original but intuitive, minimalistic but functional, simplistic but not brutish. To develop an entirely new way of accessing your phone through a meaningful & unique interaction between one's mobile phone & themselves.
Simply put, if we're going to redesign a time-tested & ubiquitous design that anyone with a smart phone recognizes, feels universally intuitive to use & yet remains as minimalistic as possible, then we're going to do it right.
The Detailed Sketches
We now wanted to further develop our ideas. What we ended up going with, of course, was the Style-to-Unlock concept. That said, we still weren't 100% sold on the idea. There is a lot wrong with it. Firstly, why would it be a different sections of statues? Surely it can be something more memorable, or more meaningful or at the very least more minimalistic? Worse yet, there aren't enough meaningful combinations. The 3rd section of the statue is it's legs; how many statues have upright figures? How many are on horseback? How many feature multiple people? How many variations of legs can there be?
So clearly the original concept had major flaws. Well, that's where the detailed sketches come in. Below are our 3 most influential detailed sketches.
Part 2
PickPocket
For the second part of the second project, we were required to develop an interface based on a sensor-input (i.e. accelerometer, gyroscope, light, camera, etc) to unlock a mobile device. Again, it was time to dive into several rounds of concept sketching, brainstorming, developing variations and finally coding. In the end, we developed created PickPocket.
The Concept Sketches
Again, our team struggled initially. It was weird, we simultaneously had the freedom to develop anything we wanted, total creative freedom and yet... it was as though we were paralyzed with options. But on the other hand, we were limited by the hardware on any given mobile device that we could properly & functionally use, in addition to our limited man-hours & budget.
But we pushed ahead and did our absolute best to come up with any idea we could, and we ended up with the following concept sketches.
The Detailed Sketches
Okay so we persevered. We pushed through and came up with a few concept sketches. But now what?
We noticed that the key entry & fishing concepts had by far the most potential. So we developed variations on those. In the end we did go with a variation of the key entry concept, but keep in mind that we were torn between the two. They both had serious potential, but the fishing concept seemed to require a level of complexity that made it impractical for a simple unlock phone interface.
See the detailed sketch descriptions below for more.