Our strategy includes designing a washer and dryer that does not require the user’s action to proceed from washing to drying, design a product that saves time, energy and recycles water. Among our goals is stressing the importance of sustainability and convincing a manufacturer that this product is going to be marketable and fill a significant portion of demand. By clearly illustrating these characteristics our main goal would be to persuade a company representative that our product would be a successful commercial item that would be worth manufacturing.

For achieving that goal we must design a clever, simple and recognizable logo that conveys the ideas mentioned above: ease of use, economy, environmental sensitivity, and of course less time spent doing laundry. Our website layout should be simple, clean, easy and pleasurable to navigate. It will have to display in detail our product’s technical characteristics. We will use HTML, CSS, photography, animation, and copy to clearly illustrate the product’s advantages and specifications.

The user should be able to understand with clarity why our washing/drying machine is better than a simple washer/dryer combo and why it would be profitable to mass produce it.  A manufacturer representative should be able to navigate and see the different parts of the product, each subsystem separately and everything put together, using an intuitive and efficient interface.

The Chive is an app meant for procrastination. It is a gallery of photo albums with catchy title names, such as, FLBP (future lower back problems) which features pictures of girls or “Daily Morning Awesomeness”, which is an ode to photoshops less professional applications. The app is very entertaining and it’s something I look at to take a break from the stress of daily life. Its usability is fairly simple. The footer has tabs for “latest”, “shuffle”, “videos”, “top rated”, and “more”. This allows for seamless procrastination. I find myself unable to put it down because of the sensory overload so readily available. The functionality of the app is faulty at times. When scrolling through albums it sometimes sticks while your finger continues down, most likely due to loading time for the thumbnail picture on each album. The videos have a hard time loading without a perfect wifi network. The interface, while fairly simple to use, was not completely designed for a mobile device. Some of the album titles are too long for the width of the phone and it is impossible to see the entire album name without going to a desktop computer. Aesthetically, I like the green highlighted over a dark industrial background, but the gradient is too heavy and the logo seems meaningless in its design. thechive.com

The app I use regularly is the Monster Mobile Application.  The usability function, the interface, the design, and the aesthetics of the application are very important and help to make this app one of the better apps for job searching.

The user-friendly advantage makes job searching easy for the average-employable human being.  More importantly, the creation of this app gives its users an on-the-go option as you can now search for jobs out in public or in the privacy of your home.  The app is also user friendly based on the labeling of each page, very basic, as my seven year old was able to navigate with simple task.

The functionality of the mobile application is to make life easier.  Years ago, job searching was an all day thing.  Get up early, eat a good breakfast and head-out into the world to gather applications.  It was an even longer process to go home and proceed with filling them out, being sure to answer all questions clearly and careful not to make a mistake, attach a resume so that you could head out the following morning to deliver your completed applications back to the company.  Years later, the process became a little easier as folks were able to complete applications online.  Today, with the mobile Monster application, it is as simple as setting up an account, uploading a resume, search for your job of choice and hitting the submit button.

The design of the application is pretty simple.  There are a couple ways in which the user can search for jobs as well as the wonderful feature of emailing its users based on searches that he or she made during previous interactions.  These searches also populate into an email that the app sends daily.

The aesthetics of the app are very clean and the color palette is held to 4 colors, purple, white, black and a hint of orange.  The color purple is an excellent choice as through research I found that it means seeking spiritual fulfillment, it is also calming which helps if you have an overly anxious user searching for a job.  The horizontal layout of each page is consistent throughout the app and each link only takes you as far as one more page, which forces its users to go back to the main page, keeping any confusion down.

Overall, the usability function, the design, and the aesthetics of the application are very important and help to make this app one of the better apps for job searching.  No matter if you are a college graduate, a high school student or a 60-year-old retiree looking for a job, the Monster mobile app is very easy to use.  The emails you receive as an active user are also great as they help the user stay on top of any new possible jobs.

Tumblr’s mobile app functions much in the same way that their site does, which is very specific and well known among Tumblr users. Tumblr makes use of a monochromatic color scheme, making all buttons, backgrounds and links a variation of blue. Navigation is simple as the app uses infinite scroll. Users can like or reblog from each photo with one tap or long press from the dashboard button. He or she can proceed to the previous poster’s blog from each post as well. Further navigation can be done from the nav bar at the base of the app. Users can sift through tags from the tag page, and see personal stats, reblogs and likes, and find users from the account page. To post he or she can press the new post button, and a menu is brought up where the user can choose from a text, photo, quote, link, chat or video post. To reload or refresh any page, all the user must do is swipe down from the top of the smart phone, or if they would like to return to the top of the queue, double tap the button for whichever page they are on. The app is aesthetically clean and relatively simple, which accents Tumblr’s ease of use. For a 4.5 star app as Tumblr is rated by 10,500 users, it is need of repair. Often glitch ridden, users are frequently frustrated with the app. The dashboard often freezes up, sending the user to the top of the page, which becomes frustrating with infinite scroll, as he or she is not able to get to the point that they previously left off. Gif’s do not load correctly often times, which in many cases causes the app to slow down, crash, and in the worst case lock up the screen, causing the user to restart their phone and waste battery life. In a scenario where the user frequents both the site and the app, he or she will notice that with increased use from Tumblr’s site, the app will fail to recognize any posts that have been reblogged or liked until the app has been completely shut down multiple times. Other common reviews show that users have issues with loading past the blue screen and slow scrolling. All of these issues are somewhat minor, and if resolved the app would attract more users to tumblr on both the site and app.

The Manga Reader created and operated by Ice Age Apps, targets a very specific demographic. People who enjoy reading anime would highly enjoy this app, because it provides an endless amount of different genres of manga series. This application is user friendly and provides readers with easy access to their favorite mangas right at the their fingertips.

This application functions smoothly and effectively, providing users with instant contact information, in which they will assist with any possible questions users may need answered. Also this app offers advertising to join their team to do translation work. Each issue needs translated from Japanese into English and they offer possible jobs for users who are even more into manga than just average readers. Manga Reader rarely has a time period where their app runs slow, or crashes randomly. They offer a search bar at the top of the home screen incase users know exactly what they are looking for. Other than that the navigation is very diverse users can search through categories, top choices for male and female, or even just search through the entire list of mangas organized alphabetically.

The interface provides any user to have complete customizable options, which is the Favorites button. This part of the app is where users have stored their favorite mangas, which can be deleted if the user would change his or her mind later on. Within Favorites, any series, within the users top selections, will alert the user with a notification on the mobile device that a new chapter has been release and for which manga it is for. The interface is well created specifically for users to have a great environment to read from.

The design of the Manga Reader App is very simple and clean. The use of black, white, and grey allows for a very easy feel. They chose to use a highlight color of a light blue, which shows where the user is within the app. This allows the user to never be confused where they is which is a smart decision when thinking about usability and design together. The layout is simple with a blue banner across the top with the title of the page you are viewing. This also helps with the user navigation. The choice of type applies to the design also, due to the simple sans serif.

Aesthetically the app does not focus around design but more along the lines of function. Ice Age Apps focused more on the text to get the message across, in order for users to not get distracted with images. It seems they were aiming to get users to go straight to what they were looking for. This functionally aesthetic app provides easy to read type and well thought out navigation.

One important feature that would benefit this app would be within the download page. Each series should have a group which contains each new chapter that the user would chose to download, because as of now each new chapter downloaded is in order and different series intermix in a long list of type. This new feature would allow for users to have an easier time going into their downloads and finding the specific issue they would like to read.