Design

What a difference a couple of years makes. Before iPhone came along, the world of touch screen devices was moribund – confined to tablet PC’s with pens and not much else. Today, fingertip driven UI’s are the rage, and the enthusiasm for touch devices generated by the launch of iPhone continues unabated. Consider the following stories currently headlining techmeme:

All of that without a mention of Apple’s mysterious tablet device, which has been rumoured for months now.

It begs a question, naturally, which is “What is the future of the netbook?”. An enthusiastic netbook user, myself, I wonder whether I might instead substitute a slate if a suitable one were available. After all, netbook’s are most useful for simple email, web browsing, presentation display and the like. Couldn’t a slate fulfill a similar purpose? I already find myself reading a substantial amount on the tiny iPhone display – more so today than on my HP Mini netbook. Would I read even more on a device with a larger and sharper screen which incorporated natural page-turn gestures?

Food for thought, eh?

{ 1 comment }

Have you ever been in one of those design meetings where everyone gets hung up on colors, or button placement, rather than focusing on the fundamentals of how the product is supposed to work? We all tend to obsess over the minutiae of the design rather than functionality, which is putting the cart before the horse. It’s human nature, I guess.

When we set out to create the iPhone version of Calliflower, we wanted to avoid this trap. Enter Balsamiq Mockups. This great little product lets you quickly create “pencil” sketches of your design, allowing you to sidestep the whole issue of look and feel in your review process. With a palette of common widgets and some easy to use drawing tools, Balsamiq Mockups lets you blow through initial designs easily and efficiently.

Here’s one of the many mock-ups we created during that process. It shows the upcoming calls screen and explains how it works to the developers. This was created in a few minutes to be part of the Calliflower on iPhone functional specification.

Later, this drawing was transformed by graphic artists into the final piece of user interface. During the process, of course, many iterations of the graphical elements were done, but because the design had been set in the beginning the graphical elements could be could be completed separately from the coding.

Below you can see the final implementation. It’s pretty similar to the mock-up.

Bottom line: for $79, Balsamiq Mockups was a great investment during the development of Calliflower for iPhone. Balsamiq Mockups earned its keep many times over. Recommended!