Background :

Walking through the crowded streets of Manhattan NY, I was suddenly hit with the urge to use the bathroom. Some of you may know how dangerous this can be. Public bathrooms are a rare commodity in New York City, and many other cities across the United States. As a broke college student, being a "paying customer" was easier said than done. Many bathrooms lay behind a locked door that can only be accessed by those that receive the key from the worker behind the register. This is where I had the thought, a thought we've all had in our life at one time or another, "If only there was an app for this." An app to find a bathroom when you need it the most, ideally something that is clean and close. This is where Toilet Finder was born.

Design :

Design for the App started like most, it began with the quick sketches in my notebook to get everything down on paper as the ideas flooded in. Here are a few concept drawings I drew before I started building:

Then I brought the sketched designs to the computer to be wire-framed out.

Colors :

Next we needed a style, this was pretty intuitive since it was after all, an app that revolved around the bathroom. I decided to go with lots of different shades of blues with some orange-yellows for highlights and some fun simplistic font that was clean and easy to read.

Assets :

After this I decided to start making some of the icons and assets that would go along with the app. Again, being on the more novelty and quirky app style, I felt that many of the assets should be simplistic and fun. I decided to go with a man resembling someone that has to use the bathroom as main icon for the location of the user. I really liked this idea but also felt that this will require some later testing to make sure the users understood what it was and didn’t affect usability.

Screen Flow :

Next we jumped into Sketch. This where I designed many of the workflows and GUI elements. I pulled ideas from my hand drawn sketches and developed on them with the assets I created as well as the styles I had previously decided on.

Final Design :

After settling on a user-flow and a comfortable GUI for the app, we brought everything into InVision to be prototyped. I experimented with many different animations for the app. I wanted it to feel lightweight but also have a clean polish with smooth fluid animations. Below is the final product!

Conclusion :

I thoroughly enjoyed designing all the quirky elements that went into building this app. It was a lot of fun following the theme I set for myself and bringing an original idea to fruition. I plan to design and prototype more apps like this in the near future, so keep checking back if you liked this one! For any questions or ideas regarding this project, feel free to reach out to me.