Ashley Meyer
About my work:
My goal is to make humans more comfortable when they use technology. The purpose of a piece of technology is to improve our lives (whether it's a hammer, a computer keyboard, or an iphone app), and it should also be a satisfying experience overall. I'm here to help make those experiences more satisfying.
A responsive web-based wine and spirits inventory system for dealers and importers
Freenters: a free printing service for college students
iPhone app concept: a self-tracking health app
New design for a biotech startup's public-facing website
Interactivity and architecture for an iPad app for travelers
I created a set of interfaces for an iPad app that helps travelers discover travel experiences using their social network. The app's content was to include a screen showing a map of the recommendations the user's friends had sent her, and a list of saved businesses and activities to do. The problem I helped solve was allowing the user to navigate from screen to screen, and creating a mechanism for discovering and searching for more businesses and activities. I sketched out a few different designs for a business/activity search screen, and iterated several times on all screens' designs to arrive at a top navigation bar that the user could use to access all parts of the app.
The Topnav contains liks to the app home (logo), San Francisco home (city logo), map view (push-pin icon), favorites/"saved" list (star), and business/activity search page (search bar). The map view shows all recs from friends, and saved items. The detailed popup for a business or experience is shown when the user taps on the name from the search page, the city home page, or recommendations from friends on the map. Users save recommendations/experiences to their "Saved" page by tapping the star in the corner of the business/experience popup.
Rather than showing the user a list of experiences plotted out on a map, we show the user their recommendations and plans on a timeline, or in a ranked list. When you're thinking of all things you're going to do in the next 2 or 3 days, you don't visualize them on a geographical map; you visualize them temporally, or organized by priority, or how excited you are about each of them. When you're deciding where to eat, or go drinking, you'll be happier with your choice if you sort your option by recommendation, or what cuisine you're feeling like. If you browse your options on a map, the only thing you're optimizing by is location, which isn't necessarily correlated to the best experience.
Concept: Google Maps as an educational map
This is an unimplemented idea. This is a conceptual design of an interface for Google Maps that would allow users to turn off the display of Roads, Cities, and States/Provinces, using checkboxes.
It would be great if Google Maps could be a place to learn about where countries and cities are in the world, so I made a mockup of what it would be like if it were possible for the user to declutter the map and remove all the noisy details, using checkboxes for Roads, Cities, and Provinces.
This is a feature that could be built into Google Maps' interface, or could be implemented as a Google Maps API app.
Concept: Yelp homepage, cleaned up for better dining-out decisionmaking.
This is an unimplemented idea. It's a simple, straightforward form where users can ask the question, "Where should I go for dinner tonight?"
I also cleaned up Yelp's homepage overall, to help users decide where to dine out, and more easily explore Yelp's wealth of information on businesses.
I removed some unnecessary elements:
- Featured Yelpers (there's no reason we should care about these people), timestamps on Recent Reviews (we already know they're recent)
- The "Go to my profile" button (there's already a link at the top, and this is unlikely to be the user's top priority when arriving at yelp.com)
- The email provider logos (gmail, msn, yahoo, etc) in the "Invite your friends" box. The collection of logos are distracting and advertisey, and the phrase "Invite your friends" is immediate enough for users to understand that button on a glance.
- "Today in Talk" box, which had totally random and too-brief-to-be-interesting snippets of recent forum comments. If we're trying to draw people to the forums, there's probably a less noisy way.
I added addresses next to the businesses under "New Reviews Near You", to show how near to
they user they're located.
I turned some clunky lists into tidy drop-down menus (current city, business categories, neighborhoods)
I took out yellow alerts box that says "Todays alerts! Feb 27, 2011", and moved all alerts (messages, compliments, new friends) to the top nav. The top nav is where users look for this kind of personal social news. The body of the page is for them to conduct the business that they set out to do.
Concept: Simple language changes on Facebook
Lady Gaga is not a page; she is a celebrity. Luke doesn't like pages, he likes people and companies and movies. Luke likes things, and the user might decide to Like some things, too, if they're presented as "things" instead of "pages".