The Bondumi team aim to create a space that allow people to bond over the passions they dedicate their lives to. A place for people to share knowledge or take part in others. I collaborated with them to design an app that enables their users to do just that. Together with a programmer I created a UI and conducted light user research and testing to ensure the apps success. The app has yet to be launched, awaiting some business decisions, but I am here showcasing the final result of the design process.
UI/UX Designer
Sketch, Illustrator
As a new app and new company there were no previously available material to get a feel for the brand’s identity. Instead interviews with stakeholders and a competitive analysis of competitors were made. The latter resulted in the MVP documentation that served as a feature guide for me (the designer) and the programming team.
Once the brand feel was established I carried out light user research in form of creating user personas based on the desired target audience specified by the the stakeholders. This allowed me to get a feel for the potential users of the app and deepened the understanding between me and the stakeholders.
Wireframing and prototyping took place in Marvel App that allowed me to create a fully functional prototype to use for testing and communication purposes with the rest of the team.
One of the app’s key features was “New service creation” so it was especially important that it would be intuitive to find the feature itself. User testing with low fidelity wireframes through Marvel App was conducted and three places in the app was identified as possible locations for the feature: On the homepage top right corner, on the service activity page, and on the profile page. Motivations for these locations was founded in the familiarity of that feature in other apps. Competitors identified in the brand research stage were also mentioned by the users in their motivations.
The Bondumi team wished for the app to be a virtual work place for those who decided to offer their services. Hence the design exploration circled around a bright team with one or two accent colors. Focus should be on the content and a wish for the user to customize their own space with imagery.
In addition to app design we decided to go ahead and create custom illustrations for the empty states. Making an app for two sets of users: Learners and Guides, we needed to account for the areas where Guides would fill in information but Learners would not.
As a new idea and app Bondumi did not have a graphic identity and with that, no logotype. The project required a logotype to be designed and basic graphic elements to be defined. The process started out with finding the perfect logo and icon design to communicate the intent and feel of the app.
The process of designing the logotype for Bondumi started from a brief that described the wish to communicate the bond between people and potentially use the B as an icon similarly to how other social media platforms utilize letters in their app icons e.g. Facebook and Linkedin.
We finally settled on an icon more explicit to the bonding between two people that also included the infinity symbol, requested by the Bondumi team.
