Chips

Chips is an app for artists and designers who need instant access to digital color palettes and save color inspirations.

Duration

June 2020 - July 2020

Project Info

Solo-work

Tools Used

Sketch

Project Objective

Many artists and designers take photos for their inspirations. One of these inspirations they want to record are the colors and the textures. From their experience, they were having trouble applying their inspirations from the photographs that they took.

With this project, I am trying to simplify the process of applying the inspirations to their design piece. To accomplish this, I needed to conduct in-depth interviews with the artists and designers to see what their pain points are and how I can improve that experience. I created multiple prototypes to design the ideal experience. By analyzing the competitors, I was able to understand why artists and designers are not using those apps. Finally, I set personas to simulate the user experience in order to see if the final design achieved the goal of simplifying the experience.

What’s the Problem?

It’s a hassle to extract colors from photos you took using your phone.

Great! A wild color combination you like appeared! You used your Pokeball(phone) to capture the inspiration for later use. You tried to find the photo you took to use your poster project a few days later. You scrolled through the endless photo album filled with your selfies, silly photos of your girlfriend/boyfriend, the food you ate a few days ago with your friends, trying to find the exact photo you took. Now you found it! Now, airdrop it to your laptop, import to photoshop, extract color with a color picker, and you are done. You got the colors you want and the Hex codes.

Phew! Bit of a hassle isn’t it?

Then why don’t you use the color palette app?

I interviewed some artists and designers who use the color palette app that is out in the market, and here are some of the insights.

“The color chips on the main page are too small, so the users can hardly see its actual color. Also, the touch area is awkward for me.” - Kate, Fashion Designer

“Buttons and Icons are not user-friendly throughout the app, especially since the color management page does not allow delicate controls.” - Juliette, Graphic Designer

“Some software uses a color wheel with a color picker for adjusting colors, but this interface does not offer accurate color control for the designers.” - David, Illustrator

User Research

I traced three artists and designers how they recorded their color and texture inspirations and implemented them into their projects. Here are the results.

Persona

Kim

25 Years Old

Illustrator

Finds her inspirations from nature. Usually takes pictures from the default camera application, piles them up in the album, and then exports them to her PC.

Daniel

31 Years Old

Graphic Designer

He loves to use various gradients and always looking for a pair of colors for his artwork. He uses a color palette app from the AppStore but finds it is hard for daily use.

The Mission

Design a user experience that can instantly capture and save color and a palette library interface that is well organized and easy to look at the individual colors.

Happy Path

Prototypes

I had to use very bold design language to make sure that the palettes were very visible to the artists and designers. Here are some of the prototypes I made and feedbacks on each of them.

“The colors are still hard to see because it’s too narrow.”

“I want to see a single solid color. Palettes look so close to each other.”

"I wish there was an option for full bleed and dark mode because it is better to see the palettes in various backgrounds. I want to know the gradient palettes on the main screen."