design – Designing Mobile Experiences

24 February, 201424 February, 2014

iShows

iShows is an iPhone app that helps you manage and keep track of your favorite TV Shows.

Introduction
There are so many great TV shows on right now that it can be hard to keep up. iShows aims to help you manage and keep track of your favorite TV shows in a simple but visual aesthetic way. Unlike “TVShow Time,” and some other show tracking apps, iShows does not require you (or offer the ability) to create an account. Also, most apps in this category contain an excessive amount of features whereas iShows focuses on providing a few features, but doing it very well.

Navigation
Basically, the app contains three sections, which act like panels and make it easy to know where you are:

1. The main panel is the one you will see when you open the app. It displays a list of shows you are following and provides the option to add new shows via the + icon. Adding a new show is just entering the title into the search field or choosing from a list of “trending” shows. The “Following” view includes two layout options – list and grid.

2. You get to the second panel when clicking on one of your listed shows. It displays general information about the TV show or a specific episode. Since the app aims to be concise, only basic information such as air dates, short episode/series plots and casting is provided. For additional information, IMDB links are provided.

3. The third panel can be accessed by moving the second panel to the left. This is the actual management of episodes. Here, you can mark which episodes you have seen in order for iShows to tell you if you are behind on any episodes or when the next episode is up. It is as simple as tapping the eye icon on an episode or a season name to mark it as watched

Customization
An extra and really cool yet simple feature in iShows is the ability to customize the UI design. As mentioned it is possible to choose between list and grit layout, between a light or dark theme, sort by episode or alphabetically, choose to display an app badge count, clear the cache, and select your notification preferences – that’s it.

Parting thoughts
iShows is a good example of how an app can be designed to upstage those that are already well established. Interacting with iShows is a pleasure because of its simple focus and structure and its polished design. For me personally, the app covers a real need by tracking my TV shows since my brain gave up a long time ago.

Links

– Elin Linding Jørgensen

17 February, 201417 February, 2014

Colorschemer

Introduction

Colorschemer is an app designed for designers. It does one thing only and it does it well. It allows you to create and share five color palettes for use when designing digital products such as apps or websites. When a palette is saved it is also published to the community creating a vast pool of color palettes to be inspired from. Colorschemer has an http counterpart called colourlovers.com. Combined they make up a community built entirely around the creation and sharing of color palettes.

Getting inspired

The home/default screen of the app is a seemingly never ending stream of color palettes. The tab is called “All Pallettes”. The main goal of the app is to inspire the user by showing the collective creations of the community. This feature can be very useful when coming up with the initial thoughts for a design and how this should “look and feel”.

Creating your own

When you have been inspired by the works of others you can create your own color palette which can then serve as a useful tool throughout the rest of the design process. The app has a couple of methods for choosing the colors carefully. I prefer the “Photoschemer” which allows you to choose colors from pictures using a classic eyedropper tool. That way I can get inspired by beautiful things I have taken pictures of in the past and try to recreate the atmosphere of the picture in five simple colors. It’s challengin but fun. In the picture below I have created a color palette from a picture I took of some ridiculously colorful shoes a couple of weeks ago.

Inspiring others

A color palette can by saved to “My Palettes” to be used as a design tool or just for inspiration. When it is saved it is also automatically published to the community and will appear in the “All Palettes” stream. Other users can then be inspired by your work, and has the option to save it, comment and like as known from other social network/community services.

Personal opinion

Colorschemer is one of those apps created for a niche of users with very specific needs. I happen to be one of those users but I doubt the app will ever become mainstream, useful or interesting to the majority of people. I have personally been impressed with the pure simplicity of both design and content of this app. It is very focused on doing one thing and doing that thing well. I especially find the contrast between the simplicity of the medium (five colored squares in line) and the endless combinations (one iphone pixel can show 16,777,216 color variations) intriguing. I have also experimented with creating recognizable objects in using this simple medium. See if you can find/guess three of them in this screenshot:

Read more and get the app here. It may very well come in handy in the design process we are in the beginning of.

Ronnie

11 February, 201411 February, 2014

QuizUp

I first heard of QuizUp last November, and as a trivia nerd I couldn’t help downloading it. I thought that like every other game app, including Scrabble / Words with Friends, I’d get over it within a few days and never again go onto it. Instead, I found myself hooked and I play multiple rounds of trivia games a day. QuizUp hit 1M downloads within the first week of its launch, and was no.1 on the app store in mid November. The app has a beautiful designed user experience, starting with the simplicity of the layout. Their biggest strength lies in the number of questions they have curated across categories ranging from TV shows to standard general knowledge questions and more.

Engagement:
The app is extremely engaging, and builds in some strong techniques for this:

The questions are timed which means a user is fully engaged when they’re attempting to answer the 10 questions in a round. Further, you can never really stop with just one round – a win motivates you to go for a winning streak, a lose motivates you to challenge the winner in an attempt to win the next round.
It gives you an opportunity to get a custom title once you pass Level 10 in a category. Just the thought that you can move up from ‘beginner’ to ’novice’ to finally creating something cool for yourself keeps you hooked. This also helps increase engagement because you can level up based on your performance in a specific area of strength. I tend to keep playing the Literature trivia because I do well at it, and I’m sure each user has a personal favorite which they use to motivate themselves when they’re on a losing streak.
It also has some really well done visualizations that you can use to track your progress and motivate you to keep playing, and in a way feels like a quantified self app for trivia.

All of these are standard principles used across games, but QuizUp has managed to apply them well, and tie them in with an easy to use, extremely pleasing experience.

The Social Component:
While the app incorporates a social component where you could challenge your friends, I also like that it does not make this option in-your-face. You could just as easily choose to play with a random opponent.

Trivia, coupled with a system of levels and well designed user interface ensures that I stay up playing this game over and over in the hope that I will finally beat some random person across the globe in a game of brand trivia. And now that I opened the app to write this post (and played 2 rounds in the process of collecting pictures for this post), I’m going to have to go back to keep playing till I win.