Guangyan's Sketches (click images to enlarge)
When coming up with my designs, I first looked at the problem statement of our project. Reiterating it here, we found that young people interested in getting a first tattoo may have no clue about the tattoo design process, or have misconceptions. This causes frustration between artist and client. Therefore, the main goal of my project is to educate first time users through some process so they can kickstart their tattoo creation process with the right mindset and expectations.
Design 1 - Self exploration
The main goal here when I came up with this design to to allow the first time user to learn through a guided self-exploration process.
This is how it works. The main interface consists of a large continuous gallery on the left and a user's sketchpad on the right. The gallery on the left is a specially curated gallery of tattoo designs, curated by various tattoo artists also using the interface, and chosen specifically as a good representation of well-designed tattoos. Each design is also tagged with labels such as category of tattoo (e.g. Japanese, tribal etc), and may also have a simple star rating system.
The gallery is primarily sorted randomly, with the labels not visible to the user. However, the user can also use the menu bar at the top of the gallery to do more category-specific browsing. Otherwise, if he has no idea what he likes, he can click Randomize and browse available tattoo designs. When the user likes a design, he can simply drag and drop a design to the right into his sketchpad. This sketchpad holds a fixed number of chosen designs, for example, 20. The user can junk any he wishes by dragging it into the dustbin.
Once the user has a certain number of designs chosen (e.g. 5), a button "Analyze my Selection" lights up, and the user can click that. This brings us to the second drawing at the bottom, where the sketchpad expands to shows a computer generated analysis of the user's collection, specifically telling him about what tattoo genres he seems to like, and also (based on some weighted function) recommends tattoo artists he should look for based on the styles he likes and the distance from a specified location.
This also means that there will be a database of tattoo artists, which includes their specialties, locations and preferences. By repeatedly browsing the different tattoos at random and seeing what sort of choices he likes, the user will hopefully be able to learn a bit more about what sort of tattoo genre he likes, and can kick start his tattoo design process.
Design 2 - Handheld Browsing
The mai