Role
UX Designer, UI Designer
Problem
Making paper airplanes is fun and educational, but it can be difficult to find or follow instructions for advanced designs. What if there was an easy way to find new airplane designs, follow along with instructions, and create your own? I decided to mock up an app called Airplane Builder.
This was a personal project with limited scope, so I created three personas to define my audience and their needs.
Gabby, age 10
Gabby is a budding engineer and loves making paper airplanes. She wants to be just like her older brother, Sam! Gabby gets distracted easily, but she can spend hours with digital devices, especially her tablet. She wants to experiment with building new plane designs – all by herself. She also wants to build her favorite designs over and over and show them to her friends.
Sam, age 20
Sam is Gabby’s older brother. He’s in college, studying to be an engineer, and he misses his sister. Sam is a creative guy and likes to build and invent. Before he went to college, he spent a lot of time building things with Gabby. He’d like to see what she’s working on and send her blueprints for new airplanes he creates.
Danielle, age 42
Danielle is Sam and Gabby’s mother. She’s a tutor and works from home most of the time. When Gabby’s not at school, Danielle is constantly looking for things to keep her busy. She doesn’t mind Gabby playing with her tablet as long as she’s actively engaging with her environment too. Paper airplanes are a great way to keep Gabby busy! But Danielle does worry about privacy and keeping Gabby safe on the internet.
Acceptance Criteria
With these personas in mind, I created four acceptance criteria for Plane Builder:
- The app is usable and attractive for both children and adults.
- The app can share designs between users, but there is no chat feature.
- The app saves the user’s favorite designs to build again.
- The app allows users to upload their own designs.
Ideation
The plane designs will appear in a rotational, 3D space, which will make folding instructions easier to understand. I sketched ideas for screens and devices in marker, and decided that Gabby is likely using a tablet, and focused on a mobile-oriented design. Interactions with the design can occur through swipes, taps, and pinches. I also considered empty states and error screens.
Errors and empty states 
Error screens
Mockup
I used Adobe XD for mockups. I carefully mapped a user flow, then filled in each stage with UI elements and instructional text. Screens, error states, and menus are fleshed out.
I kept the app design simple so children and adults could use it. Instead of in-app sharing, it integrates with existing social media like Facebook so users can safely share content. Each plane design has a difficulty level and flight characteristics, so users can discover new types of plane. In the instruction screens, the paper is shown before and after folding.
The app includes a library that saves designs and shows users their stats. It also gives instructions for users to photograph and upload designs.
Evaluation
This was my first UX project, so it never went through a development cycle or user testing. Looking back, I would like to clean up the UI design, especially the size of icons and buttons. I would also redesign the Settings page for better figure/ground contrast on the text. But this project helped me enormously in understanding the UX design process, and it was a lot of fun to make!