The Road to Getting Featured by Apple
Last week we released a new version of Parable. If you’re not familiar with Parable, it’s like Instagram for thoughts. Few days after the release, we were thrilled to learn that both the Parable iPhone and iPad apps were featured by Apple. The featured version was a culmination of many months of work and incorporated feedback from our users.
Apple loves beautifully designed products that showcase the iOS platform. Here are some of the product decisions that improved the app substantially and likely brought us to the attention of Apple to earn the coveted featured spot.
Simplify Core Functionality
The original Parable creation experience was clunky. It was clear from feedback that there were usability issues we had to fix.
The screen had major issues;
Font resizing with pinch and zoom was not discoverable.
Key formatting options were crammed together making them difficult to access.
Creating a post required a lot of thought and work.
The buttons are too small.
To address the issues above, we built a set of playful presets. Posting with presets is more intuitive and removes the cognitive overload of too many formatting decisions. Next we broke down the previously concentrated functions and gave them their own real estate.
As an example, tapping on Alignment leads to this screen. Font, size and color have their own corresponding screens.
We received feedback that photo backgrounds were hard to find. Previously, to select a photo background, the user had to tap the small circled camera located in the top right hand corner. Users simply missed this functionality altogether. Our new photo access is front and center making it difficult to miss.
We built a custom camera with filters. Apple loves custom functionality because it shows attention to detail and intimate knowledge of their platform. Naturally these are behaviors they like to encourage.
Feeds - Surface Relevant Content
To make Parable interesting and relevant we created three different feeds;
- Popular feed represents content that was most liked by the Parable community.
- Latest feed serves content by freshness.
- Followed feed is from people you follow.
A key aspect of feeds are the built in engagement features. Parable users can like, share or comment on each Parable in the feeds. We made it easier to do all three by making icons for likes, shares and comments bigger. This makes them more touchable. We also surface the latest comment for a richer and more interesting parable consumption experience.
Apple’s recent introduction of new device sizes provides more screen space for apps to shine. From our experience, the incremental development time required to enable this pays off with designs that users love on their big screens. Parable has been optimized to make the best use of all Apple screen sizes. We tested with an array of devices — iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 plus, iPad and iPad mini to ensure that there were no UI glitches.
In addition, the iPad app required custom layouts and orientations to capture all the consumption habits of the big screen — whether on a train or a couch.
Build Delightful Features
Users can share their Parables on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, text and email. To post on Instagram and Pinterest, we used deep linking
We are very proud of the sharing animation. It’s delightful and surprising. Here’s a peek.
Profile — Create a Personal Space
We spruced up the profile by giving it a cleaner look.
We hope you enjoy the brand new Parable! You can try it by downloading here.
Special thanks to Steven Sinofsky, Leo Polovets, Heather Russell, Michael Schechter, Ashita Achuthan and Kieran Wong for all the amazing feedback and support.
Have comments, questions or something you want to see covered? Feel free to reach out. You can do so via comments on this post, our personal Twitter accounts; Natalia and Amit, Parable Twitter account here, or email me (natalia at parable.it).
