Description
This mobile application was designed for BrainStation's UI Design certificate class. Over the course of 2 months, I learned the principles of UI design – including UI elements, best practices, and human-centered design – to create intuitive and interactive interfaces. Having worked closely with academics and researchers, I was familiar with the myriad issues that arise when trying to get a paper published in a scientific journal. This app is my solution for making the academic publishing process more seamless and collaborative, enabling scientists to focus on what they do best – the research itself.
Problem
The process of scientific publication is long and arduous with many steps, often involving many people who join at different time points. Some specific issues include:
Timeline: getting a research paper published takes a lot of time, often multiple years. It can be easy to lose track of tasks and people.
People: there are often many people that contribute to a research paper. Those who join later in the process may not even know the basic information about the research project they are helping with (such as title, co-authors, goals, outcomes).
Communication: lack of communication between supervisors and students, or to academics at other institutions may slow the progress of research.
Mental Health: many graduate students and researchers struggle with anxiety and depression as the academic system instils a high degree of pressure to publish often and to conduct meaningful research that contributes to the scientific community. Helping the audience visualize their progress may help to mitigate this.
Solution
Develop a mobile and web app that breaks the research process into discrete steps that are easily tracked and allow task delegation, creates a streamlined dashboard that contains all ongoing and completed research projects in one place, provides a 'Tips and Questions' section where the user can get specific advice from collaborators.
User Flow Diagram
Lo-fi Wireframes
All wireframes and UI elements were designed in Sketch.
Hi-Fi Wireframes
Brand assets
Finished Prototype
Interactivity and user testing was conducted using InVision. I'm pleased to say the final mobile app design was selected to be displayed in a showcase of exemplary work at BrainStation!
