Form Follows Function: A Hard Lesson in App Design
Here at Citrrus, our Creative team is hard at work taking inventory of the latest apps to hit the streets so our clients can benefit from cutting edge techniques to make their app a smashing succcess. Like a moth to a flame, we can't help but dissect, sneer, and swoon over other designer's work and find ourselves pinning up UI and UX elements to our Pinterest boards at an alarming rate. We chat a lot about good and bad examples that come across our desks and it would be selfish for us to keep that feedback to our whiteboards and wiki's, so we're officially kicking off #ThursdayThrowdown: where one app enters the ring and battles it out with the Citrrus creative team.
This month, we took on Columbia's GPS Pal. If first impressions are anything to go by, this app made us swoon. With hand crafted details like unique typography, beveled table dividers, and custom tab navigation carried all the way down to the very last pixel—not to mention the dreamy splash screen—this app had us at "launch". Take a look and you'll see why:
But then we started to use the app. And that's where our love-fest started to fizzle.
We discovered that it wasn't very intuitive—the first few frantic taps left us hungry for a 'get started' guide and on tap #2 we reached an empty journal. The HELP section wasn't very pleasing either. The texture was not as crisp as it is in the rest of the app, the fonts have weird bevels, and the FAQs are laid out in a boring table view that does not seem to have a logical order or keyword search capability. Since we are problem solvers, here's a solution for the kind folks over at Columbia: try using stylized empty data screens or maybe tool tip hints to guide your users through their first few steps of creating content.
In the Journal screen (assuming you had a few entries stacked in there), the placement of the detail disclosure icon ignores Apple's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) of consistency and conditioned behavior in table usage. We rarely see tables where the detail disclosure button is not centered vertically in the cell and try to emplore this in most table apps we build for clients.
Another nit picky thing that goes along with Apple's HIG recommendations of consistency is that this app chose to use a custom styled action sheet for socially sharing entries instead of Apple's standard action sheet overlay. Most apps use the standard action sheet for sharing functionality—so much so in fact that we're willing to bet most users could share on their preferred platform with their eyes closed. Recommendation: don't ignore familiar behaviors; it will only trip up your users.
Like a bad joke that needs explaining, we were still waiting to get the punchline. As we started to track activities and load up a few journal entries we hit a major snag: how do you delete journal entries?! [insert broken record sound here] Took us a while to figure it out, but supposedly the only way to do this is through their Web interface. Tsk tsk, Columbia. Don't you know that users expect to have the power to easily create and remove data? If you take away their power and make it harder for them to complete basic tasks, they probably won't revisit your app much again.
All in all, we give this app a 'Citrrus' grade of:
User Interface: B+ User Experience: C- Moral of the story: don't put all your efforts into the lovely UI of an app at the expense of UX.