THE FANAD HEAD LIGHTHOUSE APP
Creating my App
My app was to help tourists with little English when visiting our landmark so the main outcomes I wanted to see with the design of my app was that it was accessible to people of all ages and nationalities and it would better their experience of the lighthouse.
The two main steps I took with the design process were:
1. Looking at examples of similar existing apps/ How it would work.
2. Looking at the design.
Looking at the design
The design of my app was to centre around simplicity and easy accessibility so it is easily used for people of all ages and nationalities. When I had the concept, I then created the wireframes of how I wanted the app to work.
Once I knew how I wanted it to work, I went onto looking at colour schemes. I looked at our existing logo and drew from that. Our logo comprises of a white lighthouse, and two waves both light blue and navy. In the final design I decided to stick with a blue background with white type/ icons with a bit of black. The strong colours against each other also allowed a high contrast and easy visibility.
From then I moved onto what each slide looked like. I chose simple designs with very few options solely because I wanted it to be easy to use and the clutter, I felt, would add complication. The design of the icons were universal because I wanted it to be instantly recognisable for again people of all ages and nationalities. I also changed the logo for the lighthouse for this reason too. I made it a simple logo and based it on what the universal symbol of a lighthouse looked like. This logo is visible on the loading screen of the app. Then for the typography I looked at sans serif fonts because it was simple in design. The font I chose then was Roboto.
iPhone Mock-Up.
iPad Mock-up.
The above prototype I made on InVision. It shows me select both non-audio (first) and audio (second). Non-audio shows a paragraph you can read and the audio plays a selection of the tour in Italian.
Conclusion
To conclude, I feel the app is effective as it will benefit the tourists that come to Fanad Head Lighthouse as they will have an aid that will hopefully lessen the effect of the language barrier. I want the app to be advertised not only on our various social media pages and our website but also on the Wild Atlantic Way app as most of the tourists, from what I've been told, will come to the lighthouse having seen it advertised as part of the Wild Atlantic Way.
