When starting the excercise, my first step was to create the basic concept for an app, I initially was going to explore an option related to my interests. However, I recognized that for this excercise to be useful, I needed to focus on a concept that would primarily meet the needs of people other than myself. Based on this belief I started ideating common pain points I have repeatedly heard from people in my life or online. One that consistently shows up and I can relate too is the issue of having several accounts or emails across different social media and messaging platforms and not having the mental bandwidth to consistently manage communication across all of them. This led me to think of freelance workers and other independent professionals who often have several ways their clients contact them and how managing that could be made simpler. Building off these potential users, the concept was established for an application that linked a variety of platforms into one space. The name Clarity was chosen for the app based on the concept of creating a clearer and more cohesive user experience. After the application concept was established, the next step was researching other platforms and what beneficial functions they implemented and how they could be implemented and improved in Clarity. Comparative assessments were conducted on major social media platforms such as Instagram, Discord, and TikTok as well as messaging platforms such as iMessage, Slack, and WhatsApp. The key takeaways from my research were how these platforms organized and grouped functions and how they limited the amount of information on any given page.
