Daily UI Challenge: 007
I'm doing a Daily UI Design Challenge: designing a different screen each weekday for 100 days based on the prompt I receive in my email. Knowing very little about what sorts of prompts I'd receive, I decided to try my best to make all of my screens fit within a fictional travel-planning app, Let's Travel.
I'm also writing about some of my UX considerations along the way.
The first thing I did when I saw the challenge for day seven – "design settings for something" – was look at the settings pages for various apps I already had downloaded on my phone. Settings are honestly not something I'd ever paid much attention to, despite my professional inclinations, and I was surprised by the amount of variance, both in terms of what could be "set" and how the information was presented. Obviously, the specifics of what might be on a settings page will depend on the specifics of the app, but at the very least I would have expected there to be more agreement in terms of the larger categories of information.
I ended up choosing three categories into which to sort settings content. These categories are based in part on some of the trends I saw in my brief comparative analysis, and in part on thinking about what makes the most sense for my app in its current state. Here's v1 of the settings page:
The “Defaults” category should be pretty self-explanatory: anything that the user might want to set as a default. The two options that made sense to me right off the bat were currency and units of measure, but there may be others as well. I played around with adding icons to this section, similar to the payment page, but it felt too busy given the other content and interactions that needed to fit on this screen.
Next up, the user can individually select which notifications she wants to receive. Within the Android ecosystem, users can block app notifications from their phone settings, but I wanted to give the user more granularity than just one big on/off switch.
Finally, although permissions data is usually managed at the phone level, I saw a couple of apps that surfaced permissions selections within app settings. The user can see what selections she has made, and then quickly go to the app permissions page – by tapping "Manage" – to modify those selections.
This is definitely a page whose content I would expect to change as details of the app get fleshed out. For each category, I picked settings that made sense given the basic premise of the app and the pages that I have already designed, but I could see there being a need for additional default selections, notifications, or app permissions once I know more about what users will be doing within my app.
