day -7: design & reality
Daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
As a designer, it’s easy to dream away with visions of the final beautiful product you’re about to launch. You have this, sometimes blurry, sometimes crisp clear image inside your head of a perfectly stitched together app.
Functionality is one thing. Clicking a button should return an action, pulling a door handle should open the door. Today we can take all that for granted. We expect things to work. What design does however is taking the experience to a whole different level. From being: Ok > Wow.
Design can make you angry if it’s done poorly, it’s pissing you off , or if done well it touches your emotions. It makes you happy, and sometimes you just hover that thing because it triggers something inside you, like when you find something hidden.
Design takes time, and a hell of an effort. From the very first idea of a concept to the very last pixel. A button can be way more than a button, and a table can be a table that you thought didn’t exist.
The original Tweetie for iPhone is a really good example of where design is built in to the core of the app. It’s so well done, it has set a whole new standard in app design. Things like the pull-to-reload we tend to think exist in all apps now, because it feels so natural.
We’ve been working parallel with the iPhone and web app for the past weeks and it’s becoming very clear that designing the two is very different. Designing for the web you pretty much only has to know .css (cascading style sheets) and can change things instantly, whereas with the iPhone you either have to hand over Photoshop/vector files to the developers or you have to know Objective-C (the programming language to code iPhone apps.
Finally reality hit us this week. There’s no way in heaven we can implement the design we’d really want and still make the deadline. What to do? Standard UI elements. Apple has a made a kit of elements to get the ‘iPhone App Feel’ that every developer can use, maybe since they know developers are not designers. But it kind of hurts in a designers soul to fall back on those components as they’re totally generic and soulless. But reality wins this time.
Right now it’s more important to actually get this baby out of the belly to show the world, than to fiddle with rounded corners and shades pleasing the designer soul. The designer (me) has to be reminded it’s still just a proof of concept we’re making.