Lunata Rescue
A 2D indie adventure mobile game about little bugs facing a big journey.
Lunata Rescue
A 2D indie adventure mobile game about little bugs facing a big journey.
Enable App
App developed to help researchers to identify children learning difficulties.
Working on the Enable App was a fantastic experience. Beyond being a social good project, it provided me with valuable professional growth. I had the opportunity to optimize the user experience and completely redesign the app's appearance while respecting the existing implementation.
When I joined the team, my initial focus was on analyzing the existing functionalities in the app. This allowed me to suggest improvements and new features, ensuring utmost respect for the pre-existing implementations and taking care to prevent changes that might overload the workflow and schedule of the developers. Establishing good alignment with the entire team was essential for this process.
About Enable
Enable is an iPad app developed by the Catholic University of Brasilia (UCB) and Apple Developer Academy - UCB in partnership with researchers from Nottingham University. This app is a tool with games for testing cognition, learning problems and motor coordination. Initially, this was developed for researchers at Nottingham University, who had been carrying out research on children in Africa.
Researchers need a technological tool to apply preconfigured test sets on a large scale, collecting and storing the data for analysis. With this data, researchers can identify special health and learning needs and link this to demographic data to suggest solutions that help these children's learning.
This initiative reached the Catholic University of Brasília (Brazil) through the Apple Developer Academy program, bringing together mentors from the Academy, researchers, and professors from diverse fields including computer science, psychology, and pedagogy. This collaborative effort aimed to develop the project an to apply it, not only in Africa, but also in Brazil.
The core of the app is a collection of games designed by psychologists and neuroscience researchers to test children's skills as they play and then record a dataset of children's performance for researchers to analyze in the future. The data collected is related to metrics like "task" execution time, challenge interpretation, memory tests, and precision in motor coordination.
One of the main requirements of this project was that the app should be prepared for use in various locations and conditions, for exemple, it might be necessary to apply tests in schools in remote communities without adequate infrastructure, such as internet access. Therefore, in addition to the games, it was necessary to develop features that allow researchers to customize game sets offline, manage information, register children, synchronize data between iPads, and sync saved data with servers as soon as internet access becomes available.
Logo Design
Upon receiving input from project stakeholders, some primary requests were to redesign the app's appearance and create a logo. I began designing the logo to incorporate the values of the project, and then to use it as an "anchor point" for the new look.
Some alternative names for the project were discussed, this was a co-creative step that involved several suggestions from different people. The name chosen was "Enable" because it represents the focus of the project, which is to enable researchers around the world to collect data and diagnoses, so that with this data they can enable strategies that enable health and education of children in less favored communities.
Among various concepts and possible symbols discussed in a briefing with the team, the representation of hands was one of the most well-received. Therefore, I initiated the process of visual research and exploring options. This involved multiple rounds of drafts and feedback, testing different directions, and refining the design of the alternatives that stood out until we arrived at the final logo.
For the Enable, I chose colors related to the brands of the universities that support the project. In addition to that, blue is a color directly related to technology and research. As it is a project that must be clear and precise, the geometric shapes and flat colors were consistent choices.
However, the use of cold colors and geometric shapes can give the project a somewhat uninviting and impersonal feel. To counter this potential perception, I incorporate round shapes wherever possible to create a more friendly atmosphere.
I opted not to use capital letters to avoid conveying any sense of hierarchy or superiority among developers, teachers, children, researchers, or anyone else involved. I also believe that utilizing lowercase letters adds an extra layer of friendliness to the logo design.
For this project, humanity, care, humility, clarity and precision are key concepts, and the team and I believe that we designed a logo that represents these concepts.
New Visual Identity to the Interfaces
Based on the logo design, I started redesigning some UI layouts and new UI components, to achieve visual consistency and to improve usability and user engagement.
I worked with geometric shapes and rounded corners, to maintain the aspects of "care", "clarity" and "precision". For colors, I applied as the mains colors the same ones used for the logo, always using flat colors. With those shape and colors choices, I believe we achieved a balance between “seriousness”, as a scientific research should be, and “carefulness”, as anything addressed to children should be.
One point that I believe made a difference in this project, in order to maintain clarity, seriousness and legibility, was the hierarchy between texts and the "empty" spaces whose distances followed specific proportions to segregate or unify blocks of information in a comfortably visual way.
Here's a secret: I believe these "empty" spaces are one of the most beautiful parts of a layout. I like to think that these negative spaces are one of the most valuable resources for an elegant interface.
