Browsing by Author "Koponen, Timi"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1

Weighing Ultralight, User interface evaluation of a mobile photo editing application
(2018) Koponen, Timi
School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
Ultralight is a photo and video editing application developed for iOS devices. The speciality of Ultralight is its intuitive user interface where the edited photo can float behind the editing controls to allow a full editing experience on a small mobile screen. In this Master’s thesis, I study the iterative design process and research practical and lightweight user testing methods to conduct an evaluation of Ultralight’s design. Based on the findings I design a new update to the Ultralight. Ultralight is an ongoing solo-project which is fully designed and developed by myself. In the core of the iterative design process is the aim to design, analyse and refine the work in small cycles to constantly learn how well the design functions in reality. This is especially important when working with interactive applications, where the digital platforms allow incremental design, continuous change and improvement. There are different ways to collect data to analyse the performance of digital products, but in this thesis, I focus on fast and efficient user testing methods to collect qualitative data of how the participants use and value Ultralight. I use the evaluation as a design tool to improve the current state of the user interface and analyse the iterative design process through concepts of user experience design, user-centered design, usability, lean and agile methods. Doing design work in iterations and user testing in-between helps to improve the understandability and quality of the design. Doing user testing is usually thought to be cumbersome and take a lot effort. However, there are many easy and fast methods to conduct user testing in practical manners. In this thesis, I formulate an efficient and easy method for user testing, which can be conducted remotely with the help of the new screen recording feature on the iOS 11 operating sys-tem. The iterative design process aims to improve the quality of the design but it is also a crucial tool for the designers to improve their skills by collecting real feedback from their own work.