TREKS
Treks was a health management app that allows parents and their children to gain clarity on their illness and maintain a healthy lifestyle through daily check-ins and fun tasks.
The user traverses to the top of the mountain gaining points and skills in the game, while learning new skills about their well-being in real life!
From the ground up
I wanted Treks to be a health app unlike anything anyone had seen before.
Since the target demographic was 12 – 16-year-old kids, the app needed to be fun and engaging. I had my design team work on introducing light story elements and even a bit of whimsical humor to create a health app that felt more like an adventure.
All great things start with a plan. This is a flow chart that maps out the whole app. This was done very early on so everyone on the team could understand the scope of what we were trying to build.
Below you will see some wireframes I designed along with their finished counterparts.
More design time = less code changes later
This was a mockup I did in After Effects to show a proposed flow for the Treks app.
I try and do as many animation mockups and prototypes before coding begins as possible. These types of mockups are incredibly useful to get everyone on the same page before any code is written.
FANSTABLE
This is a fantasy sports app for horse shows. Players make predictions on which horses will take home the winning ribbons in various competitions.
I was brought into this project after the first round of design had already been done. Unfortunately, it was a situation where the client was frustrated with the previous design team’s work and had stopped trusting them. The design team was also unhappy and felt that the client was overriding all their recommendations.
The first thing I did when I was brought in was to listen. Turns out the client wanted a companion app to the horse shows as a focus and everything else was secondary.
I went through several rounds of reducing unnecessary information and I was able to remove half of the preexisting screens and needless navigation. I used deliberate color coding to reduce visual clutter. We ended up with a successful horse show companion app that the client (and his investors) were thrilled with.
Social Distancing
While serving as Creative Director at Thrust Interactive we came up with an idea for a social distancing app. Like many businesses at the start of the pandemic, we were trying to adapt and find innovative solutions.
The idea was to detect when mobile phones came in close contact with other phones using Bluetooth. We would measure distance and length of contact and from that would calculate how risky someone’s daily interactions were.
We came up with this concept and pitched it to AT&T who seemed interested in iterating on it with us. We came up with several versions and a working MVP.
Every new app begins with wireframes and lots of early design iterations. I like to begin designing in black and white so as not to distract from the core concept. Once the black and white designs are agreed upon we can start iterating on different color combinations.
Charles R Reid 