Printmate

UI design, Brand Design

Printmate is a printer sharing service, or an Airbnb for printer I came up with and working on recently. In terms of design, the challenge was to balance building unique design style and easiness to use as a utility mobile app.

Intro

Printmate is a printer sharing service, or an Airbnb for printer. The aim of service is to provide opportunity to print in a fast, cheap and easy way for the people who need physical print occasionally. In terms of design, the challenge was to balance building unique design style and easiness to use as a utility mobile app.

Sketching the UI concept

I started design process with listing up every elements I need to put on mobile UI and sketched a lot on my Moleskin notebook. Sketching doesn't take time and allows me to draw more freely so I can try many ways and don't need to waste time caring details at this point.

Wireframing and Interaction Design

After sketching out the UI idea, I started to make wireframe. At this point, I tried to make sure people around me could understand what's going on the app and felt comfortable enough to complete a print order. Iterated this process of making wireframes and changing interactions several times till get getting there.

Style Guide Design

And then, I started actual design with developing a style guide for the app, including typeset, color scheme, icons and other UI elements. I designed all the elements for retina and non-retina, using Sketch on Mac. I tried to make subtle uniqueness to engage users in the app, caring choice of typeface, amount of dropshadow, color scheme and so on. Actually, I went back and force between this process and next UI Design process a few times.

UI Design and Prototyping

Finally, I went on designing a series of UI based on the style guide I prepared earlier. At this moment, I focused on making it clean, simple and keeping consistency. Sometimes I needed to went back to style guide and modified it. Once I got UI designs, I prototyped the app to test it out again, using InVision. This process could be repeated until getting smooth experience for users. And the project is now ongoing.