#firstuserexperience

[adylitica]

AnySend OSX Design Study

With AnySend our goal was to create a way to send from anywhere to anywhere. This was an ambitious project: it required making OSX, Android, Windows and iOS Apps

On every platform, our goal is to achieve harmony with the platform, to implement design and features in a way that works the way that platform works. On OSX we chose a toolbar icon, but how to represent files to send?

For image content we could show the image directly, but what if you selected many different files?

Another cool feature is pushing websites from one device to another. What if we showed the website itself as a preview?

Finally what should we show in the default case?

We made lots more previews, what happens if the images are slow to render or the websites don’t load immediately or the images are odd sizes? At the concept stage we have to think about a lot of different scenarios.

In the end some of these special previews didn’t make the cut. Going from concept to reality, lots of things change.

[adylitica]

Crafting the First Yellow Calendar Experience

For Yellow we tried to merge multiple concepts into a single App. Yellow would combine a full mobile chat application with a full calendaring application to make planning everyday events as natural as sending an SMS or Whatsapp message.

To make that happen though we needed to make a calendar and a chat system and merge them together neatly. Yellow Calendar was an incredible challenge to take on and so we decided to ship as early as possible to test our preconceptions and not waste time making things that didn't fire our imaginations or satisfy the demands of mobile users.

But when we first launched we had a quandary: how can we communicate the tone of the app, the goal of the project?

We came up with a variety of options, but the idea we ended up with was a set of slides showing a wide range of uses. We brainstormed some ways to use the app and sketched up some simple slides.

To keep things light and fresh and avoid the stodginess of professional calendaring we made splash screens and login screens that enforced the concept of casual use.

In the end we tried to make the best difficult situation, even though nothing we made really clicked. The best experience is a natural experience that needs no introduction, but that's not always something that's practical to deliver at the right instant.

[adylitica]

AnySend for OSX, the First User Experience

[adylitica]

A Splash of Sketchlens

Going into Sketchlens, our project to capture sketches from real life and digitize them, we were bloodied veterans of the iPhone trenches. But right when we're reading our next project, Jony Ive threw a spanner in the works and changed the fundamental design of iOS. Flat is the way. A new kind of flat in the vein of Yahoo Weather, but still diametrically opposed to the previous type.

They zigged and we zagged, we went full old school: Skeuomorphic, full loading screen and total UI takeover. Jobs said the device would change completely depending on the App, and we went full steam ahead on that idea.

But this made things pretty tough, starting with how we could frame our App with our loading screen. We could go literal: paper sketch and camera slapped together. Or abstract: just sketchlens your buddy, he'll lens you back whatever, keep it casual.

We decided on the casual option. Sketchlens your buddy. It might have been the wrong decision though, confusion reigned about the objective and use of Sketchlens.

As our sensibilities have matured, we now try to avoid launch screens. Launching an App should now be so quick that you might not even notice it was "closed".