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
This design was designed as a stretch for a mobile device.
It has a similar browsing philosophy to Design 1, but designed specially to make handheld browsing quick, efficient and useful. It also takes advantage of the fact that people can use the time they have say waiting in a train or a bus ride, to look through tattoo designs and to curate a little sketchpad of the designs he likes.
The main interfaces comprises of a 'Menu-Icon' on the top left, and a 'Sketchpad' on the top right. Clicking the 'RSI Menu Icon' brings up a small menu bar of different modes of the application, such as the Browse mode, the View mode, the Search mode, etc. In this example, we are in the Browse mode, where the user is shown a randomly scrolling view of tattoo designs, again carefully selected as good examples by tattoo artists. The user can drag and drop designs he likes into his sketchpad to the top right. Note that it displays a little number showing how many designs the user has selected.
Once done, the user can click the sketchpad icon, which pops up a bubble allowing him to delete designs he doesn't want. At any time, the user can click "Analyse This" and the computer will, based on the images he has chosen and the labels these images are tagged with, give an analysis of the categories he seems to be interested in, and also gives a recommendation of Tattoo Artists which might suit his style.
Here, the interface focuses mostly on browsing actual tattoo designs. In this way, the user will be able to formulate a realistic idea of what tattoos are like, and be able to not only be on the right track to find a suitable artist to match his preferences, but also be more educated on the different styles of tattoos. Note that the user will also be able to do a more specific browse using the Search function, if for example he knows he is into say Tribal tattoos, and wants more inspiration.