AnimalAge - A Fast & Simplistic Animal Converter

People have sometimes wondered: "how long would I live as a hamster? Or horse? Or dog?" AnimalAge dutifully answers all of those questions.

Features

AnimalAge is designed to present you with answers as fast as possible, so you can answer that urgent question anytime, anywhere.

• Convert between any two animals.
• Type in the age of any animal on the top, where it would naturally read "10 hamster years are..." or "1 kangaroo year is...".
• The converted ages will update swiftly on the fly as you type.
• Animals are beautifully presented in a grid of cards.
• You can add or remove animals to customize the dashboard to having only the animals you're interested in.
• Tilt your phone to landscape mode to see more animals at once!

Screenshots

Video

Design

AnimalAge was designed with the following goals in mind:

• Presents a fun, warm and inviting experience. 
• Minimize the number of steps required to convert between the default animal (human) and other required animals (cat, oski, etc.).
• Able to customize the dashboard to display user's favorite animals.
• Live-update and give quick feedback on age input.

Originally, I had two designs in mind.

However, the left design soon was eliminated due to its unnecessarily space-hogging controls and unintuitive auto-sliding sliders. 

In order to design for a fun and inviting experience, I picked a color palette that's warm, friendly and vibrant.

Summary

This project was quite fun and I really enjoyed my time building this. I know that because the bulk of it was pretty much done in an 8-hour-long nonstop session. From zero experience in Android programming to this simple AnimalAge app, I learned a few things about the good and bad of the Android platform, and iterated on the original prototype a few times by using the app on my phone. I'm excited about this class and can't wait to practice my design and prototyping skills more over the semester! (And hopefully, get better at writing Android apps along the way)