August 6, 2011

Noun Project exercise

Rowan Simpson posted an interesting exercise this morning:

TIP: pick four icons at random and imagine the iPhone app that has those icons in the tab bar thenounproject.com (let's hear your ideas)

The following is a result of my spending two hours on it.

Picking the icons

The Noun Project utilises infinite scrolling for displaying icons so I thought that a better (and more fun) method was to generate four random IDs and work with thouse icons. Currently there are 712 icons so this is the search string I used at Random.org

They still haven't sorted out a proper 'new tab' page for when you click on an icon, instead relying on a modal box but you can basically plug those numbers into the following URL pattern to get your icons: http://thenounproject.com/modal/XXX/

Random.org spat out the IDs for a kidney, hopital, fast food and ethernet.

Prototyping the app in two hours

Initial ideas included a 'How much fast food can I eat before I need a hospital and where is the nearest goddang one with wifi?!'. The kidney-hospital-fast food connection was easy enough but the ethernet icon really threw a spanner in the works.

Instead of staying stuck, I threw the icons on Balsamiq to see where it'll take me instead.

I decided in the end to treat the ethernet as a graphical representation of something else and ended up with an app for a kidney mishap recovery patient that syncs with their physician's offices.

This gives the patient an overview of their sodium level, list of medication to take, a recommended menu and tracks appointments.