joe.tassallo_
Project
FontEye
Role: UI Designer, Lead Researcher
Duration: 14 days
Team: Class Team
Tools: Figma
In today's design-driven world, typography plays a crucial role in creating visually appealing and effective communication. However, identifying the perfect font can often be a challenge. Enter FontEye, the ultimate digital font identification tool that revolutionizes the way you interact with typography. Whether you're a designer, marketer, or simply a font enthusiast, FontEye empowers you to effortlessly identify fonts using your camera or photos, ensuring you always find the perfect match for your project.
The Problem
Designers and creatives often struggle to identify fonts they see on their favorite designs and save those fonts for future use. How can we help them to locate the fonts and their sources and save them for later when they are not able to access their computer at that moment?
The Goal
To empower designers, marketers, and typography enthusiasts by providing a seamless and efficient tool for font identification, ultimately enhancing their creative processes and fostering a deeper appreciation for the art of typography.
We conducted interviews with creatives who used typography in their work such as graphic designers, clothing designers, writers, and UI developers. We discovered a lack of knowledge about the existence of such tools, as well as the eagerness to use them to take their work to the next level.
Discovery & Research
User Interviews
How might we...
help users find fonts that are used in the world around them?
How might we...
help users learn, engage and interact with fonts to spark creativity?
How might we...
keep everything together, organized, ready and available?
Taking quotes from these interviews I sorted them into the primary issues that creatives face. From these quotes I developed "how might we..." questions to give context to the direction of the product.
Research Findings
Through our competitive analysis we gathered that our biggest opportunities stemmed from creating a platform that focused on limiting the work the user had to perform both inside and outside the application. As well as focus on the ability to function as a library for creatives.
Competitor Analysis
Designers and creatives often struggle to identify fonts they see on their favorite designs and save those fonts for future use. How can we help them to locate the fonts and their sources and save them for later when they are not able to access their computer at that moment?
Opportunity
Identifying the Problem
Answer
Phone Camera:
Using the phone and making everything as simple as taking a picture.
Answer
Community Driven:
community within the app where users can share their discoveries, collaborate on projects, and discuss typography trends.
Answer
Save for later:
Having the ability to save favorite fonts and manage them all within the application.
Help users can improve their design and streamline their workflow with our font identifier and have easy access to a library they have saved for future use. Our mobile font identifier app will allow users to scan pictures to identify the fonts, save them in the app’s library and share them with others.
Achieve the Goals
By prioritizing the use of the camera and linking the font library to computer applications, we ensured that FontEye delivers immediate value and enhances user workflows. Features like identifying all fonts in an image, while highly impactful, were recognized as long-term goals due to their complexity. Sharing capabilities and a home page with design articles were also considered for their potential to enrich the user experience, though they were secondary to core functionalities.
Ideation & Design
Feature Matrix
We transitioned into the sketching phase to visualize and refine our ideas. This process began with low-fidelity sketches, allowing us to quickly iterate and explore different design solutions for each prioritized feature. Moving these designs into a wireframe for tes
Sketches & Wireframes
The delete function was reported as non-functional, preventing users from removing unwanted fonts or scans, which disrupted their workflow. These insights were crucial, prompting us to enlarge and clarify the icons, redesign the interaction flows for better usability, and ensure all key features, like the delete function, operated seamlessly.
User Testing
We redesigned the favorites screen to incorporate an edit button, which allows users to enter an edit mode with a single tap. This change streamlined the user experience, making the process of managing favorite fonts more straightforward and intuitive.
To enhance the user experience when adding favorites from the scan results screen, we implemented a series of UI design changes based on user feedback. Originally, users struggled to understand how to add fonts to their favorites due to a lack of clear feedback mechanisms. To address this, we introduced popup prompts that provide immediate confirmation when a font is added to favorites.
Results, Learnings & Takeaways
Final Screens
Overview
Working on FontEye has been a transformative and rewarding experience, combining creativity, technology, and user-centric design. From conceptualizing the initial idea to refining the product through user feedback, every step has been a journey of innovation and collaboration. The challenges we faced, such as clarifying icon functions and enhancing feedback mechanisms, were met with thoughtful design solutions that ultimately enriched the user experience. This project not only deepened our understanding of user needs and design principles but also reinforced the importance of adaptability and continuous improvement in creating a successful digital tool.
The Future
We would like to conduct more research into the use of AI when it comes to using it to identify objects. The learning and implantation of it would be key for this application to work. For future plans, we would like to launch a website and or desktop app so that users can interact with the fonts that they have saved on their actual workspace. Allowing even less of an effort on the users part to go out and look for fonts and conduct their own independent searches.
