Piñata

The American Party Story

Pinata is a mobile photo-sharing app for the American college-goer, allowing anyone to catch up on the latest parties around town and experience the campus life to the fullest.

Kickoff & Research

I was hired as a contractor by the owners and we started the project with a quick meeting about what they already had planned and how they envisioned this product will be in the end.

After planning the project schedule and deliverables, I prepared persona sheets and did on-site interviews to better understand our audience and their motivations.

We held a few more meetings and bounced around possible ideas that would help improve the product and the user experience overall.

Wireframes

After the research phase, we jumped into Prototyping and Information Architecture. It was apparent from the start that the app itself would be straight-forward in terms of an interface but the real challenge lied in appealing to the target demographic and speaking their lingo if the app was to be any successful.

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After a few iterations and long discussions, we decided on a few changes and arrived at the version above. Wireframes were prepared using Mockingbird and presented as a prototype in Invision.

The Design

Having laid out the general flow of the app and wireframes for each screen, the rest of the project was a breeze.

The effort we put in at the beginning of the project paid off well and I was able to move fast and signoff the final deliverables in a relatively shorter timeframe.

A small usability study was conducted with 5 participants at the end of the project, allowing us to discover a few issues and fix them as we finalized the contract.

Here are a few selected screens from the app:

I’ve also coded up a quick animation prototype to display how each interaction changes the screen. This enabled us to get a better sense of how the app would behave before handing it in for development.

See the Pen Animation Mockups for a Mobile App by Ege Görgülü (@bamf) on CodePen.