This project was chosen by myself as I saw a need for change and had the ability to work towards a better solution.
The problem was as follows: Engaging, communicating and training more than 2500 staff across several systems is a challenging and inefficient task for any business. In its current state, Perth Stadium suffers from fragmentation of its core human resource processes. These are multiple systems, such as rostering, communications and training, which use separate websites and logins to help staff prepare and attend their shifts. There needs to be a unified way of accessing these systems in one place to remove this irritation for staff and ultimately improve the relationship between employees and the business.
I proposed an app called MyStadium. An app that would act as a central hub, accessed by staff who work at Perth Stadium for daily information regarding their job. The visual aesthetic is minimal, professional and customisable, enabling a tailored user experience for staff to interact with the business on a more personal level, quicker and easier than before. The purpose is to improve the relationship of staff and the business, create efficiencies across frequently used systems and encourage greater engagement and accessibility to the large demographic of staff that work there.
In retrospect, the design of the app was very clearly driven by the monotone colour scheme which I later made efforts to add additional colour to break up the interface. Doing so helped with visual hierarchy, and using low saturated variations of the colours for sections of less importance meant the user’s eye would be guided to the most important sections first (unread notifications and upcoming shifts). It was significant to be told this in the feedback I got as I was quite set in the colour scheme without properly considering the functional reasoning behind the choice. It also meant I could integrate the company branding better within the app. Overall the branding was taken from the naming rights owner of the stadium to fit with the stadium's branding at the time. It would have been a good opportunity to make alterations for other brand colours for future uses to see how well the designs worked beyond the blue and yellow.
The extensive research for this project helped me make decisions based on evidence and current user experiences. It involved talking to users and surveying them, understanding their needs and how what I was creating would help solve those needs. Personas were made to give an understanding of the app's typical user, putting myself in their shoes, and discovering their journey of interacting with the brand and the product. It helped me design for someone in mind, and can reinforce each of my decisions with evidence and fact. Understanding the app's competitors gave me a head start in the successes and failures that I could integrate or avoid in my own design. And lastly, investigating the visuals to create a design system that was connected to the brand I was designing for at the time and long into the future.
There were a lot of learnings in this project and for a first time designing an app (alongside another one), I would say I was both happy and disappointed. I felt I had more in it to give and I think it shows, and if I had the time and energy to develop the concepts further then I’d be confident it could be of real value. This project taught me a lot about not getting caught up perfecting things because they’re likely to change. It also taught me that users have a wealth of information which should directly correlate with the features put into the app, much like goal hierarchy in web design, app design has the same thing. I would love to animate parts of this project's presentation if given more time, something I started looking into by using After Effects, mockups and micro-interactions. This project also made me realise that big ideas need to be functional ideas, and quite often those two don’t go hand in hand. If I were to do it again, and I wanted to make it truly great, time is really the only thing I would want changed.
