My appinions on project 4

Designing for the smaller screen of the iPhone was both a challenge and a relief. It took less time and effort for my good ideas to come to fruition, but coming to those good ideas was a unique and sometimes confusing challenge. There was, however, something very familiar about designing an App, as if I was creating it to suit my own needs. I knew how I would navigate the interface, what I would expect from the functionality, and so on. You could argue that this experience should be the same for designing websites, but the mere fact that you navigate and control an App with your hands and fingers makes it much more interactive and intuitive, or at least demands that you make it so.

With all that said, it’s easy for my to forget certain conventions that all apps should keep. I wasn’t sure if I should use Apple’s back buttons, or select keys, or a whole slew of other icons that seem to appear on everything. Making my app, I strayed from using pre-made icons and buttons, hoping to give my app it’s own look, and not that of Apples. However now I wonder if that was just hurting my user’s experience, and fighting too much with convention. Looking over my app now, I see that even though I used my own buttons and my own back button, Apple’s design still managed to creep into my own, probably subconsciously. I guess this one is a fight that’s not worth fighting.

Another of my less abstract issues was that of contiguity between my pages. I had a ‘look’ that I wanted each page to adhere to, but I didn’t really have a ‘look’ that I wanted my entire app to adhere to. I think my final design makes sense because of app conventions (a map denotes a map page, a button is meant to be pushed, ect.) but apart from that falls a little short. This is seen clearly with the titles of my pages. When I was designing my app, I wasn’t thinking I wanted every page to be titled with a header. I figured the usage of that page would be clear enough to denote it’s meaning. However, once I put a header on one page (my ‘Find Around Me’ page) I realized that it was odd that the other pages didn’t follow that convention. There was a slight disconnect between my pages. This can be easily solved, I hope, my unifying my page layout, instead of varying it.

Apparently this was a very appealing assignment, that I would definitely appoint as one of my least appalling projects. Though at first I was apprehensive, I was able to approach it and ultimately find approval with my apparatus. Apple.