ShuffleBee

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  ShuffleBee App Icon

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  ShuffleBee Opening Screen

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  ShuffleBee Logo

Inspiration

During our first semester in Sheridan College’s Interaction Design Program we noticed that we and our peers were having difficulty getting familiar with some of the new design programs that were introduced to us. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much time available during class for our professors to introduce these programs, so lots of us were left to spend hours teaching ourselves when we could have been working on our projects. We took inspiration from the popular language learning app Duolingo for the method of information delivery within ShuffleBee.

The name ShuffleBee is a tribute to Sheridan IXD’s first and second year coordinator, Mark Shufflebottom, whose last name was commonly retrofitted whenever an online alias was needed (Shoutout to Kahoot’s very own Mark Shuffletop).

What it does

ShuffleBee introduces first year IXD students to commonly used softwares within the program such as Illustrator, InDesign, XD, Photoshop, Replit, and Mural. It has self-guided tutorials for all levels of understanding that will help students feel more confident in their skills and their resulting works.

How we built it

ShuffleBee was designed and prototyped in Adobe XD.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we ran into when creating ShuffleBee was mainly the platform that we chose to develop this app on. We chose to use Adobe XD because it is what we are most familiar with regarding its tools and features. However, Adobe XD is notorious for having a variety of bugs throughout, which at times made it hard to deal with. The challenge being that we are not familiar with Figma or sketch, we felt our only option was XD. An app such as ShuffleBee would have been perfect for us in this situation to help us understand how to use Figma or sketch efficiently and in a timely manner.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I think the thing we are most proud of is the fact that we didn’t lose motivation whenever we encountered a problem and that we were able to navigate them. We are also proud of the fact that we didn’t settle for the first idea that came to mind not only when it came to deciding on which project to move forward with, but also in terms of decisions and iterations within our final project.

What we learned

Carolyn: Out of the three of us, I am the most inexperienced with Adobe Xd which means that I learned a lot about the program over the span of 36 hours thanks to Aurora and Parris’ guidance. I learned about Adobe Xd’s prototyping feature and how to use it to make interactive mockups without the use of code.

Aurora: Throughout this project I learned that I really love the process of designing user interfaces for applications. I always knew I liked it before but I never had the time to try it outside of school projects. Getting to do this project allowed me to fully embrace the process while experiencing staying excited and motivated throughout.

Parris: I learned how to communicate my ideas in a team setting. Before participating in Hackville, I would struggle to voice my opinions in fear of them being shot down or rejected. I have since learned that it is important to speak up and be confident in my ideas. As a result, many of my ideas and suggestions are present in our final project.

What's next for ShuffleBee

If we were to further develop ShuffleBee we would love to start by moving beyond the prototyped version and onto a functional coded version of our app. Our next goal would be to implement accessibility features such as text to speech as well as additional design programs that we will be introduced to in the later years of this program.

Built With

• adobe
• xd