Elisa Pyykkönen

An interface design for trainee entrance task of an imaginary robotic lawnmower concept.

My role

I was in sole charge of the project.

About this Project

My design path started by getting familiar with the provided rough Balsamiq wireframe of how the interface could work, and the required feature set list which included: hardware status indicator, activity log, adjustable cutting height, weekly cutting schedule.

This led me to lay down some early ideas of what I might need to add /change based on my own experiences about lawn moving and background research I conducted. Then to make a rough design of how I could lay the features. In my research I searched what needed to be taken into consideration in lawn mowing, target group and what kind of solutions (i.e. competitors) there already are.

After that I started making more detailed design where I included all the required features. I deviated from the provided wireframe a little and added a home view where I put the cutting height and other important and mostly used controls such as lawnmower and mowing status and next scheduled mow info. Cutting height is set according to cutting height recommendations and is graduated in order to save the mechanism. Scheduling got it's own tab because I wanted to make the schedule interface clear and I thought that it was a feature that doesn't have to be utilized often after setting up. I also added settings view for fun and because it suited the design and I could include extra features that might be important for the user.

I consulted my friends in ICT field and family (who might be potential target group) from time to time taking their opinions and reactions into consideration. If I disagreed with someone and had a valid reasoning behind my choices I stuck with my gut, because of the time limit. When my prototype was done, I validated it myself and got final words from my partner, who is a team architect and a software designer, and from a friend who works as a digital content editor. They gave their thumbs up so I decided the task was done and ready to be handed over.

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What I learned

One of the biggest things learned from this project was that there are so many ways to make an interface for schedule feature and it will not please everyone's individual needs especially if it needs to be simple and easy to use. It is also hard to work with a project where you can't communicate with "the client" to get to know what they truly wanted and were after in design. It is also important how you present complex works and without being there to present it yourself, a video is a good way to do it.