Almost too simple.

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Carb_loader_01_iphone

This is a minimum viable product for an app focused on simplicity. I realize it could be even more minimal without the progress ring, but it isn’t really a feature, just a quick way to give feedback to the user. All actions are gesture based, you swipe up to add a new item, left or right to to move along the days of the week, and down for settings. The goal of this application is to give the user an approximate idea of where he/she stands, so even the input is simple and based on extremely simple language (more about this after it launches – almost there).

The bad ass iPhone illustration is from the Flat3D Mockup Kit designed by
Frank Rapacciuolo – http://freesbie.it, and of course the status bar is from the
Teehan + Lax iOS6 UI kit.

The one with the flat UI

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iPhone user interfaceI was presented with an opportunity to create a user interface for an existing third party app – which was interesting. Designing apps from the ground up means you know how the user will flow through it and what hardware parameters you may have to contend with. For this project, I was given an example and had to design around memory limitations and someone else’s user experience. Since the functionality of the app itself is fairly complex, I wanted to keep the menu system simple.

sub menu UI

Once the user taps the first segment selection, that screen slides out of the way to reveal the submenu. Nothing ground breaking, but I’m intrigued by the way the flat submenu came out.

The second image is the selected state of the submenu, and those gray boxes represent product thumbnails. Both menus had to be scalable, and this progressive disclosure system allows for infinite scroll-ability of both menus. Categories and products can be added with reckless abandon.

The white paper application

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mobile application for white papers

This is a mobile application we recently shipped that dynamically aggregates white papers and displays them on your phone or tablet. I was 1/2 art director, 2/3 product manager, 1/3 producer, 7/16 UX designer, and 1/125th copy writer. The fantastic team at Raizlabs did the hard stuff, including integrating it with our systems and helping me get it into our customer response system (of which 25% are opting in, by the way). Many thanks to that whole team, they really know what they’re doing. We pioneered many processes and connections between mobile and our existing systems. This was a fun project with a great (courageous) client and some unbelievable support not only from my team members, but our interior web development, marketing, and sales teams too.

We won a Marcom gold award for this version, and the next shippable iteration will have videos embedded and some added functionality like batch downloading and downloading in the background. Looking forward to it.

You can get it for iOS from the app store here, or for Android, here.

Asymmetrical super dog!

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This is a comp done during preliminary creation of the Flydog brand, which is a pet travel solutions company. While this may never end up getting used, I really like it. The idea behind it was to characterize the dog as a super hero getting ready to take off and go save someone. The asymmetrical shape behind is also supposed to denote movement as well as a sense of power similar to the effect of filming someone from a low angle.

iOS icon execution.

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So, once I finished the mobile icon strategy guide, I went ahead and designed the icons using said strategy. The are a series of sorts, with the unifying characteristics being the color scheme and the perspective. Additionally, 5 areas of expertise by different business units within the company are represented with the “material” that makes up the foundation of the icon. All other branding is being done before the user downloads and installs the app from campaign collateral and from the information on the app store itself. Finally, these are intended to build an association between the modern, forward thinking aspects of the company and the user.

iOS icons for strategy document.

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My team is launching an app in a week or so, and during the finalization of everything I realized that without an icon strategy these thing could get out of hand really quickly in a huge-giant company. So I wrote up an icon strategy guide outlining a few approaches and suggesting the correct course of action. Obviously we’ll need consistency with the corporate brand without all of them looking exactly the same (which is what we have now), so I focused on having a single unifying characteristic and building off of that. The best part was creating some examples using existing app names (full disclosure, the left one is my concept but executed freaking skillfully by the geniuses over at Raizlabs, the company we’ve partnered with to develop apps with us. Check them out, they really know what they’re doing). Anyway, this a sample of a couple of the icons I included in the document.

Can’t you see that’s a robot?!?

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As a kid, I watched “Short Circuit” at least 77 times. I still don’t know how Johnny 5 could put on a cowboy hat and a bandana as a disguise and nobody notice that he’s a futuristic robot with tank treads and a GIANT LASER ON HIS SHOULDER! At any rate, this is not Johnny 5. This is his overly temperamental cousin Number 1. He’s not interested in wearing cowboy hats, catching butterflies, or dancing with Ally Sheedy. He just wants to laser stuff. Rocks, computers, various military equipment, you name it, he’ll fire at it.

Done for the hell of it (truth be told I’ve always wanted to draw this robot) in Illustrator.

The UI for the super secret portal.

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This is a very small sampling of an interface I’m building for a content download and sharing portal. This is one of those projects that occur in real life, meaning that a use case had to be developed, wireframe made, multiple rounds of interface design and mock-ups, and basic usability testing done in an extremely condensed timeline. It is successful so far, and will get additional budget allocated to it for refinements in the upcoming months. Projects like this are challenging due to the nature of the limited initial budget, the VIP stakeholders, and the quick deadline, but hell, that’s what makes them fun.

Update:

After meeting with the client some new needs came about, so I refined it and below is the update. It includes a sharing functionality in which the user selects all the assets he or she wants to send to someone, and it generates an email with embed codes to everything, no matter which server it’s served from. Multiple files originating in multiple places available in a single email. Pretty cool. Also updated the buttons and did some miscellaneous cleaning.