As one of my most in depth and successful projects at Drexel so far, Dine With Dragons was an app that I designed as a Drexel centric payment app that would allow students to pay for meals together without having to divvy up costs after the fact. It is not a fully functional app, but it has been outlined and prototyped with Figma, displaying comprehensive details on the inner workings and an interaction demonstration fully animated in Adobe After Effects. This was my final project for my Interaction Design class, and perhaps I can fully realize it in the years to come at Drexel.
My initial inspiration / example service to work from was Venmo, and I had to pick it apart to isolate a singular task flow that a person would go through when using it. The only problem was that I hadn’t ever used Venmo before starting this project, only knowing that it was specifically used for paying other people, and I ended up missing some steps in the task flow. As a result, my own app design had to be built more off of my own ingenuity, imagining how it would have to function as a legitimate product, and there ended up being more steps than necessary. However, for the main stand-out function of the app, allowing multiple people to join in on a single transaction, it panned out very smoothly in the end
My initial inspiration / example service to work from was Venmo, and I had to pick it apart to isolate a singular task flow that a person would go through when using it. The only problem was that I hadn’t ever used Venmo before starting this project, only knowing that it was specifically used for paying other people, and I ended up missing some steps in the task flow. As a result, my own app design had to be built more off of my own ingenuity, imagining how it would have to function as a legitimate product, and there ended up being more steps than necessary. However, for the main stand-out function of the app, allowing multiple people to join in on a single transaction, it panned out very smoothly in the end
Where my creative ability really took flight was in the animation process. Seeing my ideas all come together in a realistic in-app experience gave me so much more confidence in the structure I had built. Everything happens so quickly and smoothly that it could very well work as a real application, and that gives me the motivation to pursue this further in the future. Not all of my animation ideas could be realized, such as a more realist coin drop animation, but it still looks polished and functional. For my first time using After Effects too, I’m incredibly proud of the end result, and have been working more with the program to fine tune my skills.