AOL

Giving AOL a better look for the users

To start this redesign, I started with finding different styles from other mail apps. I noticed pretty quickly that AOL had a very rough layout. This allowed me to search
and take ideas to make this mail app have a better design and better way to operate for the users. Once I had done that, I opened up the sketchbook and sketched
12 ideas to figure out what I liked for this mail app to look like. Below are the sketches I came up with for this redesign.

Wireframes
Once I had finished the sketches, it was time to wireframe. After studying my sketches, I was able to find six of the twelve sketches that I felt like were to give the
AOL mail app the best design. These six sketches allowed me to give the users a much better look and a more well constructed layout for this mail app. Once that
was done, it was time to create the look with wireframes and see how they would look.

This wireframe was a completely different layout than what AOL had. I took a bunch of different looks from places like Gmail, yahoo mail and others to help give
them a look that makes life easier for the user. This new AOL look will have a few key things that they don’t have located on the app. The users will have the ability
to search through the mail by using the primary, promotion and social buttons. They will also have better access to the sidebar and allow the users to navigate more
freely. Now that I had finished the wireframes, it was time to move onto the surface comps and work on the finished product.

Surface Comps
Now that my wireframes were finished and looking good, I wanted to now move onto finishing the final product. I started with figuring out the colors to use for this
final part. AOL uses multiple different blues which allowed me to try to find a main blue to work with. I decided to stick with a darker blue because I felt like it
created the best look for the mail app.

Overall
After matching my surface comps to my wireframes and added the color to help fit the feel of the new layout. I felt like I created something that not only looked
good, but also added some key components to help the user have a better experience. I like what I did with the mail app and after looking at other mail apps and
finding ideas, I felt like I designed something that would be a useful and pleasing design.