Well, another week, another pivotal, game-changing app. This time, it comes in the form of BBC's much loved iPlayer, settling down into the snug confines of the iPad - a hardware candidate surely perfectly suited for such prolonged consumption. Well, let's curl up on the proverbial sofa and take a look!
The initial experience upon launch
The application framework, in its simplicity, doesn't disappoint on first impressions - it's far less confusing and seemingly hierarchical than the website. Upon launch, users are given instant richness through the Featured section of TV, full of beautiful imagery bursting out at every opportunity, creating something of a truer representation of the Beeb's depth and bredth of content than on other device types. It's an impressive opener to the app, and praise should be given for the dedicated focus towards almost pure content as navigation.
In a nutshell, the app allows shoppers to peruse the wealth of products available for purchase on Amazon's site, though it seeks to offer a simpler, more visual method of shopping than seen in current web browsers or on its mobile apps.
It does this by throwing up a grid of products to the user, with columns representing the product categories, and the rows representing the respective products. Tapping on a product shows its details in a nicely-transitioned popup, along with basket options and other related products, but more on that later.
So, is it any good? In my opinion, it is, though perhaps not for the reasons one would expect. So first, a bit of bad:
I would argue that one of the core areas, the browsing grid, suffers. Here's why...
"Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring, apart from Mum, who was up late stressing out over plans for the Big Day..."
And so the new Waitrose Christmas iPhone and iPad app launched last week, which tries to help people like Mum, offering festive recipe suggestions and Planning Tools to make The Day go as smoothly as possible.
The app is split up into 4 key areas: Recipes, Tools & Planners, Ideas & Offers and Branches & Info, with each containing a number of sub-categories. Of these, both the Recipes and Tools are of most value.
An early gift?
Jumping straight in, users are initially treated to a date-specific advent calendar box which, upon tapping, peels away to reveal a 'treat' (or recipe). The treat in this case was a Roast Beef recipe image, but on tapping, nothing seemed to happen for about 10 seconds, until the recipe finally appeared on screen, along with ingredients, cooking instructions etc.
Arriving at The O2 at just past 8am, we began to set up our exhibition area for little spender. Comprising of a table, two chairs, a couple of macbook pros, an N95 8GB and our shiny new business cards, we were set up in a little over 10 minutes. As the venue began to fill, we wandered round, chatting to some familiar faces. The bright-eyed and fresh-faced Ben Matthews of Hotwire joined us for breakfast croissants and mobile chitter chatter.
There was a good mix of attendees, with o2 employees, sponsors and third party companies each sharing the presence. Looking back at only a year ago, the same event was restricted to internal o2 employees and we have Sandy Hammer of Conference-Art to thank for the progress made in the last 12 months.
The second Mobile Design UK event was held in London on 23rd February and ribot were invited to give one of the talks. We'd originally planned to talk on the design process for mobile applications but at the last minute decided to present something more conceptual and thought-provoking: the topic of emotion, behaviour and human context. How do real-world interactions affect those with your mobile device? How do learned mobile-specific behaviours affect those in the "real world"? Will emotional attachment be re-introduced into our digital interfaces with the help of haptics? These were some of the questions we ask in the short presentation below.
I was recently invited to give a presentation at the O2 Litmus launch day, held in the VIP lounge of the O2 Arena. I was asked to talk about mobile design and decided to orientate the 15 minute presentation to a more developer-friendly feel. Many of the day's attendees were developers (the afternoon consisted of a short hack-day-esque session), and my aim with the slides was to help increase the awareness of the importance of design in the everyday life of a mobile developer. Even just to start to consider the resultant user experience from making programming decisions would be a step in the right direction.
I bare all (or as much as I can in 15 minutes) from spending the last 5 years as a designer/developer and now entrepreneur in the mobile sector:
It was announced this week that Apple's adverts in the UK for its recently-launched 3G iPhone were to be banned after the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld 17 complaints finding them to be misleading.
The central issue related to the advertised speed when browsing the internet and the Maps application on the device, which Apple itself referred to as "really fast".
It said the advert was likely to lead viewers to believe that the device actually operated at or near to the speeds shown in the advert.
With the watchdog stating: "Because we understood that it did not, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead", what kind of reminders does this have for the rest of us in the industry?
Some may say it's just an advert, but the banning of these widely-shown broadcasts, of such a tightly-run, squeaky-clean ship such as Apple somehow puts into question the real quality of its mobile user experience.
But, to suggest that Apple needs to fake the experience in some way need not be all bad. Furthermore, it teaches us a few things...
We've just received a shiny new BlackBerry Storm from Vodafone UK. It's our first expedition into the world of BlackBerry and we thought we'd share our thoughts on the interface and interaction design of the device in general.
Overview
The Storm is a rough diamond. Lovely industrial design, but let down substantially not by the lack of Wi-Fi, which has had all the press, but instead by the quality of the touch-operating system. Touted as an iPhone killer, I can confidently confirm that the Storm is unfortunately only half an iPhone. Confusing interactions, hard-to-click buttons and an unpolished UI result in an irritating performance. BlackBerry OS 4.7 is clearly a platform that hasn't been fully designed for finger interaction, which is a huge shame. That said, the Storm will get better with age, with over the air (OTA) software updates, through which most of these issues will be ironed out. The Storm (or its successors) will in time contend with the likes of the iPhone.
Recently, ribot sponsored an Brighton-based event called £5 App, kindly supplying some thirst-quenching beer to all the attendees. Though this normally wouldn't deserve its own blog, here at ribot towers, we decided to do something a little different...
Now that the iPhone SDK is out, many people are starting to build, or thinking about building iPhone applications. It's incredibly important to understand how to design interfaces for this device. Here are some high-level tips...
