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Best Birthdays

App Design

The Best Birthdays app is designed to help teens and college students celebrate their loved ones’ birthdays — so it's their best birthday ever. This app goes beyond the typical birthday app by helping users not only remember birthdays but also prioritize close friends, prepare in advance, and celebrate birthdays creatively. A cheerful color palette makes the app appealing, and the icon ensures the app's function is easily recognized on a busy screen.

Prototype

Try out the interactive wireframe below.

Process

Structure

User Personas

Miguel, 18

Miguel is a busy high school senior with lots of friends. He gets good grades but (as he jokes) his favorite subjects are track and lunch. With keeping up with his friends and schoolwork, he tends to forget about his three younger sisters’ birthdays despite his best intentions.

Katie, 16

Katie is a bit of an introvert, but birthdays intersect with her true love: music. She knows birthday songs from countries throughout the world. She tries to remember to sing one for each of her friends and acquaintances at school; she wouldn’t want to miss a lunchtime performance by forgetting a birthday.

Britt, 26

Brittany is a new wife and the favorite aunt of two nephews. There are lots of new people in her life lately (in-laws for instance!), and tracking all the birthdays is getting trickier than ever. She still keeps up with a few friends from college who she doesn’t want to forget to celebrate either.

Icons

Design Process

After researching existing birthday reminder apps and finding a niche for Best Birthdays as an app that does more than just reminder users of birthdays, the app's structure and visual design were roughed out in a wireframe. This was tested by a variety of users (primarly classmates) and refined based on their suggestions.

One of the most influential changes to the design that came about through test user feedback started with an offhand comment from one user who said the first thing he wanted to see when he opened the app was some kind of calendar. Instead of creating a separate home page, the app directs users straight to this core functionality.

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