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App Design - How & where to start.

Know The Market

Before I begin to design an app I need to understand the market that I will be targeting. I have found that the biggest advantage for designing mobile apps is to be a user of mobile apps. This made it easier to understand the needs and the problems that associate with a mobile application. I quickly learnt that my focus should always be on either iPhone or Android as these are the two most common platforms.

Visual Inspiration

Visual design is constantly changing therefore it is imperative for a designer to watch and analyse other designs. Each and every design has their own specific visual style and tone. By doing this, designers will gain better knowledge and a wider visual information. Great websites to look at are mobile-patterns.com, pttrns.com and iOS icons as these websites have hundreds of high quality screens for mobile applications. 

Mobile Design Patterns

One of the most important things a designer should do before starting to design is to study existing patterns of mobile design. By doing this you can analyse various kinds of interfaces, menus and navigations, which can be used as a foundation for my own mobile app design. Design patterns are a great way to help you see in a simple way what solutions already exist and how it can affect your interface in question.

Start Designing

After you have gathered information on your market, found a wide range of inspiration and learnt a number of mobile design patterns. The next phase is to start designing. It is normally a good idea to start sketching before you jump to  Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator and create pixels.

When you start sketching, a good idea is to draw out a template of an iPhone grid or buy an iPhone sketchbook. This allows for you to sketch your design ideas onto an iPhone layout and preview it live on paper.

After you have completed a number of sketches it would be wise to build a basic prototype of your app. A great application to use is Keynote. Keynote allows for users to easily build an app skeleton by dragging and dropping elements which helps to get a feel of what you are trying to achieve.

Once you have created your skeleton screens it would be a good idea to build a final polished prototype in either Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. A couple of great iOS templates include teehan+lax and Pandora UI. A great Android template to use would be https://www.teehanlax.com/tools/android/.

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Design & Conflict

Today I had the pleasure of attending a talk on Design and Conflict by Mike Catto. Mike Catto is a highly respected educator and historian, and has taught in the School of Art and Design, University of Ulster in Belfast. Mike is a pioneer of the media industry and has been broadcasting and writing about the media since 1975.

The first topic of discussion was the famous book, written by noted transcendentalist, Henry Thoreau.

The book reflects upon simple living in natural surroundings and details the real life experiences of Thoreau. Thoreau spent 2 years, 2 months and 2 days in a cabin he built in the woods, near Walden Pond, Concord, Massachusetts.

The book is mainly determined to be a declaration of independence and a social experiment to discover ones own spirituality.

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

This quote by Thoreau tells us that while ideas and dreams are good, we need to build the foundations to make them a success. This can be very easily adapted into the world of design.

This is a very simple, yet effective model which shows how the journey of communication. It was created by Warren Weaver and Claude Shannon in 1948.

In the design world, the word that sticks out like a sore thumb is “NOISE SOURCE”. The noise is the physical disturbances like environment, people, etc. which does not let the message get to the receiver as what is sent.

As a designer the biggest challenge we have are customers. Customers always think in a different way than designers. It is extremely frustrating when the designs created are right, in the eye of productivity, but is wrong in the eye of the customer. This is why it is fundamental that designers try to warp themselves into the mind of a customer.

Even when a customer is wrong, they are right.

In the words of Robert Burns, no matter how carefully a project is planned, something may still go wrong with it.

Robert Burns also said “The best laid plans, take 40 years to complete”.

Harry Beck was a technical draughtsman who brought his practice of technical drawing to designing the London Underground Map. Beck believed that the most important aspect of the map was to display vital information of the running order of stations. All unnecessary detail is removed, e.g. scale and distance. This allows people to read and follow with minimal difficulty. These maps are called Topological maps.

However, a recent study shows that the London Underground Map is falling out of favour, due to the simple fact that, because it was created in 1931, it is dated and needs replace. This shows that even tho the design still hits the nail on the head, as it did in 1931. The design was not created in the customer mindset and therefore it is wrong, customers are always right.

The Baroque Arsenal is a book written by Mary Kaldor and published in 1981.

Within the book, Mary Kaldor argues that “Modern military technology is not advanced, it is decadent.”

It is a very interesting argument as it brings weapons into the spotlight, not the users. Mary views that the sophisticated arms of today’s world are often incapable of achieving the military objectives, set out to accomplish, and that they erode the finances of nations who participate in the arms trade of producing and buying.

Understanding Comics is a non-fiction, graphic book, written by Scott McCloud and published in 1993.

The main argument within the book is that comics are defined by the sequence of images that tell a story. That non-linear narrative are used in comics to allow the for the interactions and choices of the reader.

McCloud mentions the Bayeux Tapestry as the precedent for comics and argues that, Swiss caricaturist Rodolphe Töpffer as “the father of the modern comic”.

Understanding Comics is considered one of the best books for visual design and story telling, and has been described as“one of the most insightful books about designing graphic user interfaces ever written” by Apple Macintosh co-creator Andy Hertzfeld.

Pasta is a great example of purpose design. No one truly knows the origins of pasta. Some say that the first reference was dated back to Sicily in 1154, while others believe that Marco Polo brought back pasta from his travels to Asia, in the early 13th Century.

There are over 350 different variants of pasta. Different pasta shapes have been designed in certain ways, some shapes hold sauces better than other shapes.

An example would be the dish Spaghetti Bolognese. Spaghetti Bolognese is a dish, associated with Italy, and typically eaten in Western countries. However, it will never be found on the menu in any Italian restaurants.

Bolognese is a dish that originated in Bologna and is traditionally accompanied with tagliatelle. Tagliatelle is served because it is denser and more able to soak up and hold the thick bolognese sauce, while if spaghetti was used, the bolognese sauce would run of the spaghetti strands.

Earlier we talked about the Shannon & Weaver Model of Communication, and how noise can play a major influence in the process of design.

An example of this is carrots. The agreed origins of carrots are from the Asian market and have been exported to Europe for thousands of years. Carrot seeds were found in Switzerland and Germany dating back to 3000 BC.

Carrots were traditionally in the colours of purple and yellow. This was all about to change. In the 17th Century, Dutch farmers found a way to cultivate and grow a new denser carrot that was orange in colour. The orange colour was used as a tribute to the man who fought for Dutch independence, William of Orange. Thousands of years of the history of purple and yellow carrots, forgotten in an instant.

Again I am going back to Shannon & Weaver Model of Communication, and how noise can play a major influence in the process of design. You can not mention how ‘noise can play a major influence in the process of design’ without mentioning the Luddites.

A ‘Luddite’ is a term coined to someone who is opposed to change.

The term is named after Ned Ludd, a weaver apprentice, who smashed up two stocking frames. Ludd is believed to be a fictitious character, created by the public to shock the government and give a name to the cause.

The Luddites were a group of weavers and textile workers from 19th century England. During the 19th century, machinery was being experimented as a more efficient way to produce goods, this was known as the Industrial Revolution. Luddites believed that the time they spent learning the skills as weavers and textile artists would be a waste of time as these new machinery would replace their jobs.

People have a misconception that the role of Luddites was to stop all forms of technology but this is not true. Luddites fought the idea of machinery as this would lead to massive job loss.

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Gamification - The Beginning

Gamification is the process of adding game components into a working environment to increase motivation, while also increasing the levels of productivity.

One of the first gamification methods was S&H Green Stamps. S&H Green Stamps were a line of trading stamps popular in the United States from the 1930s until the late 1980s. They were distributed as part of a rewards program. During the 1960s, the company promoted its rewards catalog as being the largest publication in the United States and boasted that it issued three times as many stamps as the U.S. Postal Service. Customers would receive stamps at the checkout counter of supermarkets, department stores, and gasoline stations among other retailers, which could be redeemed for products in the catalog.

Through my research I discovered two quotes from the Greek philosopher Plato, which are considered one of the first theories in relation to gamification and motivation.

“A Person in psychic harmony is motivated by reason to act morally.”

“Actions generate and maintain our character. This provides the motivation to be and act virtuously.”

Plato believed that motivation came from the chest (courage) and the abdomen (appetite). This idea has been debunked, due to research that show that motivation is triggered by a neurotransmitter in our brain called Dopamine.

Dopamine, aka. the feel-good hormone, is a neurotransmitter which is released whenever we are rewarded for a specific action. The best way to release the dopamine hormone is through gamification. Ways that you can release your dopamine transmitter are:

Change company culture

Encourage collaboration and healthy competition

Change behaviours

Build team cohesion