Prototype Design for The Weathermark Application

Discuss About The System Physically Low Fidelity Prototyping.

The flood water indicator system comprises an application that is referred as Weathermark which is meant for sending and receiving the alert when water levels rise to alarming levels. The user interface of the application will allow users to receive and send flood warning given by the flood alarm indicator at any given time. The application will be developed to run on various platforms namely Windows phone, Android, IOS, Mac, Web, and Window. The ability to have the application run on various platform marks it easy to be easily accessed and reach many people at a particular location hence making it possible to send the alert more effectively.

The prototype design will model the user interface after most popular social networking applications namely Google+ or Facebook. For quick navigation buttons, confirmation buttons across the bottom and grids of icons for menu options within the application, the application will use a menu bar across the top (Barrenechea, et al., 2015). The changes climatic conditions has unfavorably impacted on the climate pattern causing extended winter and heavy downfall as well as summer. Consequently, this has caused the destruction of properties and loss of lives globally. This has formed the basis that has directed modeling of the prototype that is part of the flood alarm system which is meant to give a warning or an alert in the system in case of an imminent flood approaching for the necessary actions to be taken and property, as well as lives, can be protected. The prototype had to take after designs from Google and Facebook could aid leveraging some of the money that was spent and some of the time while designing the application.

The design of the flood alarm indicator system is regional base and since it is mostly intended to run on smartphone member of that particular location are required to sign up (Vardhan, and Jin, 2016). This not only resident join in the program but be able to track individuals in case of a flood in terms whether they received an alert or when was the last time logging in when flooding occurs.

Scenario 2 mainly focuses on the user ability to operate the application from the point of launching and stopping the app effectively without out any challenges.  To enable this self-drive navigation model will be utilized and subsequently executed on every platform that the app has been developed to run and additionally utilize the components of familiarity among the users.  

Scenario Planning for The Weathermark Application

For the application to successfully achieve the purpose, it was intended for it has to effectively send an alert by the administrator and the same relayed to all other members who have joined the application. This scenario presents the administrator the capacity to send the alert when buzzer rings and the ability of the users to view the same alert on time so as the necessary measures can be taken into account.  

The design implementation at this scenario has been done in most the most simplified way to allow all user are able to use it despite their different levels of skills. The water frames have varying colors where specific details are to be entered to avoid complication and wrong entry. Also, it involves few details to enter to make it simpler for users to join (Mueller, et al., 2015). Combined with collapsible scrolling accommodating to the screen the scrollable factor on small size gadgets and scrolling items to additionally supplement the need to spare space on small size gadgets and permit a better experience for users.

The app has to main section administrator and the user section. After logging, the administrator has only one privilege over the user and he or she can send the alert since the alarm indicator is installed on his or her premise. Therefore, all users and administrator has to sign-up first. For the users to run the application they will have to tap on the app’s icon on the screen. This will launch a screen showing various weather bars and the user can select one weather icon at a time by tapping on a particular icon. By launching the rainy bar, the bar will expand in a menu that has a menu that has consist two categories.

1. Rainfall – clicking on this bar it will show the recording of water levels
2. Floods – this will aid the user to receive or send an alert to people within a given location.

When the administrator launches the application, the only unique icon it has is the sending button but the rest of the features are the same. When there is a flood, the administrator will send the alert only when the buzzer of the flood alarm indicator system beeps. The users within the radius whether the system is installed will receive a notification similar to a Facebook messenger message. The users will open the app in order to view the alert.

The app gives the user a chance to view the previous flood alert messages sent in terms of time, date and month. The history part consists of three and there are scrollable and the user can tap at particular alert and view in their details.

1. All – the alerts are lists with according to the dates in ascending manner
2. Dates- here one can view the alerts in terms of dates and time sent
3. Sender- here the users can scroll the information of the sender of the particular administrator who sent the alert.

User Interface

Through the implementation of a category dashboard, it enabled the design to group all the application task rationally so that the user can navigate through the app with easiness and interface can look aesthetically pleasing (Björnfot, and Kaptelinin, 2017). The implementation of design choices with the app has been enabled to additionally supplement its capacity to used by the various user with different levels of skills. The prototype choices that have been executed within this application have been done to additional supplement its capacity to accommodate to different user types.

The main idea of developing this application is to have an app that is unobtrusive and serve to save peoples lives and properties within a given locality when the floods occur using their phones they can receive an alert. The design of the alert icon allows the bar to run on the background at the same time it enables the user access application other different functionalities by expanding the alert icon (Camburn, et al., 2017). The alert icon is a good indicator that the application is still running.

Since the application is intended to run on several platforms, the operation is the same and one can easily navigate through the app with a lot of easiness since a few concepts have been introduced compared to apps like Facebook and Google +

• Tapping + pressing on the alert icon invoke an action send or read an alert.
• Tapping on the alert bar expands or collapse the app.
• The home screen is integrated with the alert icon

During the design, it was crucial to the users gaining fluency with the interface and acquiring experience in its operations as well liking to use several (Hamanishi, et al., 2018). In addition, one more notable thing about the design is having a different calm, cool and clean colors schemes employed within the application, which supplements the consistency and averts overwhelming of users with conflicting components contained

Conclusion

In conclusion, the design was able to follow many valuable lessons learned regarding the interface design of the applications. This prototype consisted visual clues or cues which will direct the user in order to interact with the application in a particular manner. Users are shown how to open the menus and dismiss the dialogue box by this prototype. The application will incorporate small arrows on the top bar slider to indicate that is can be slid or pressed. Moreover, the user can simply tell how to interact with the app by sliding down on the progress bar.

By the advancement of various leveled task examination and wireframes in respect to the WaterMark application. The project has possessed the capacity to adequately tend main user related interactions and their encompassing issues. Through these being tended to by use of different approaches of the design contemplations that will at last upgrade the app use. In addition, the user experience additionally contributing to its achievement with this being a critical part of an applications headway.

References

Barrenechea, M., Anderson, K.M., Palen, L. and White, J., 2015, January. Engineering crowdwork for disaster events: The human-centered development of a lost-and-found tasking environment. In System Sciences (HICSS), 2015 48th Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 182-191). IEEE.

Björnfot, P. and Kaptelinin, V., 2017, March. Probing the design space of a telepresence robot gesture arm with low fidelity prototypes. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 352-360). ACM.

Busche, L., 2014. The Skeptic’s Guide to Low-Fidelity Prototyping. Smashing magazine.

Camburn, B.A., Arlitt, R., Perez, K.B., Anderson, D.S., Choo, P.K., Lim, T., Gilmour, A. and Wood, K.L., 2017. Design prototyping of systems. ICED 2017.

Chen, L. and Sass, L., 2016. Fresh Press Modeler: A generative system for physically based low fidelity prototyping. Computers & Graphics, 54, pp.157-165.

Hamanishi, N., Kono, M., Suwa, S., Miyaki, T. and Rekimoto, J., 2018, March. Flufy: Recyclable and Edible Rapid Prototyping using Fluffed Sugar. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces Companion (p. 27). ACM.

Mueller, S., Beyer, D., Mohr, T., Gurevich, S., Teibrich, A., Pfistere, L., Guenther, K., Frohnhofen, J., Chen, H.T., Baudisch, P. and Im, S., 2015, April. Low-fidelity fabrication: Speeding up design iteration of 3D objects. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 327-330). ACM.

Vardhan, H., Akin, B. and Jin, H., 2016. A low-cost, high-fidelity processor-in-the loop platform: For rapid prototyping of power electronics circuits and motor drives. IEEE power electronics magazine, 3(2), pp.18-28.