Frog Voyage has been a journey in itself. I have learnt a lot from the experience of researching and developing this project from initial idea stage to a fully developed concept that has a mockup of the user experience.
The research stage was the most important to me as it meant I was in a position to give a reason why I had done things in a certain way. I started by looking how Google’s internal teams follow a structure, then I started by following those.
Next up I started looking at how to best approach my target audience, which led me to learn lots of very important factors that would influence the overall project. These ranged from current products/services they used and why, gamification of a website to encourage engagement to the use of storytelling, emotions and characteristics.
It was a very interesting project to work on as it meant I was able to challenge myself to do something completely new that I had never previously achieved. It meant I had to use my research and initiative to decide on the best way to achieve my goals. Starting entirely from scratch, is difficult. As there were no other competitors in the market, it was entirely down to my own vision to create this product and the only influences came from other services, mainly games, that were aimed at the same demographic.
Working on the logo was a great experience, as the ‘design rules’ I had previously learnt became very flexible and had to readjust for the target audience. Another concern I had was when I realise my logo had been stolen by a phishing scam website on the site shopify. I felt very unhappy at the fact someone had used my work in such a way. I immediately called the relevant people and managed to get the logo taken down from the website. This was a scary situation for me to have my work stolen and used to scam people, and it made me look into registering copyright and trademark to avoid future infringement.
The characters were a very important part of my project so I needed to ensure I did them properly, by allowing the kids from my target audience pick their favourite ones, it meant there would be a variety of frogs that were all popular. This was important, as they were to be animated, and become the figurehead for the experience. Working with the illustrator was difficult as, to cut costs i’d asked a co-worker which meant I felt like I was being annoying when asking for updates on the illustrations. Once the Illustration work was done, I was able to make small editing adjustments myself and then apply 15 various colour schemes to them. This resulted in many different characters for the users to choose from.
The actual making of the design was an important step that took many months and went through multiple iterations to get to the stage it’s at now. The only part that hasn’t really changed is the way the virtual experiences are linear one screen layouts, that each have a theme. It’s the overall layout of these individual pages that took the largest amount of time, as I justified the placement of every item within the design and related it back to my research. If it didn’t relate to the research, then I took it out of the design.
With the design almost complete, I started looking further into the future with the consideration of profitability and how plausible investments would become. I spoke to an entrepreneur from Silicon Valley over a Skype call who was able to offer me some in depth feedback on my project and his overall thoughts on the usability. It was an incredible experience that really opened my eyes to the possibilities my project had. His feedback made it into my mockups and helped with the overall user experience.
This over I decided to get in touch with some web agencies with the intention of getting a quote of building the site. The response was touching and greater than I expected. A large international company turned me down, as my project was too small, another large company with clients in the Nasdaq was intrigued by the potential my project had and suggested that a partnership should be worked out to get the product to market and finally another who were willing to build Frog Voyage were interested by the service. With many entrepreneurs offering advice online that I was still in the friends & family investment stage, it was obvious that this wouldn’t be an easy decision that could be made before I finish university. Instead it was something I needed to think about for a longer a period of time, and potentially be something that I take into my future, to evolve and develop as an actual business.
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