Posts Tagged ‘design’

A bit about Weather, lah

Since joining buUuk a couple of months ago, I’ve been working on quite a few different projects. Most of them are for clients and are still being developed. Hopefully, they will see the light of the app store soon. Weatherlah is a project that we started as an internal training project and released in around 6 weeks. Version 1.2 of the app just hit the app store today and it has some really major updates.

When we started with Weatherlah, it was a Weather forecast display app with a focus on the PSI levels and rain forecast for different regions in Singapore. We got the idea after the haze incidents of November. Our priority was to not spend too much time on it and the first mockup looked something like this:

wpid-weatherlah-mockup-v1-2011-01-25-09-371.png

The “Alerts” feature developed into something very interesting. We added the ability to set rain alerts for different regions of Singapore. Background location from the iPhone gave us the idea to alert you if it’s going to rain in whatever region of Singapore you might be. By this time, the second iteration of the design was in place and the “Alerts” section itself went through a few iterations:

wpid-app-mockup-v2-screen2-2011-01-25-09-371.png wpid-alerts-v2-with-warnings2-2011-01-25-09-371.png wpid-alerts-warning-v3-2011-01-25-09-371.png

Most of this work made it through to version 1.0 of the release. We got really good reviews for the app and downloads were going really well. People started talking about Weatherlah and that gave us some good feedback. The rain alerts were mostly quite accurate but at times when they would not get the forecast right, the users started tweeting about it. Ofcourse, this was only 2 weeks into the app being public, but that gave us the idea for another experimental feature. We rolled out a test in version 1.1 and today with version 1.2 we are releasing the the complete “Crowdcast” feature. In the Crowdcast section of the app, you can vote to let others know if it’s raining where ever you are in Singapore. We observe the voting trend and display an icon next to the official forecast for all regions in Singapore. You can tap on any of the regions and check the actual votes as well.

wpid-PhotoJan25100911AM-2011-01-25-09-371.jpg wpid-PhotoJan25101036AM-2011-01-25-09-371.jpg

It’s a fun project and we’ve been very happy with the response so far! Hopefuly it was able to let you know in advance that going to Sentosa over the last weekend was a bad idea and instead, you stayed home and enjoyed “Scott Pilgrim vs the rest of the world”.

Published on: January 25th, 2011

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Posted in Apps discussed, Codewise, Conceptwise

Skuemorphic design

skeuomorph: A design feature copied from a similar artifact in another material, even when not functionally necessary. For example, the click sound of a shutter in an analog camera that is now reproduced in a digital camera by playing a sound clip.

Read some very interesting articles on skeuomorphic UI design patterns that we see so much these days in all iOS devices:

Apple demonstrated some really nice ways of using this while designing apps and inspired an entire generation of apps. Skuemorphs are good to ease the learning curve for your apps—but as mentioned in the articles they can act quite contrary when overdone or used without caution. Aaron Weyenberg sums it up quite well:

Skeuomorphic and realistic UI components are susceptible to the following hazards:
        •        Changing the original component’s behavior to fit a new function or feature
        •        Straining or breaking established UI standards
        •        Incorrectly assuming the user is familiar with the original component
        •        An appetite for screen space

In my experience, when skuemorphs are used purely for decorative purpose, things are bound to go wrong. I’m very interested in discovering app design based not on traditional interfaces but experimenting with new graphic design directions. Calvetica is a neat example.

Published on: November 8th, 2010

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Posted in Conceptwise

CV on a poster

A friend of mine had been thinking of re-doing her website recently and asked me for feedback on her ideas. She’s an interaction designer by profession and I hold her to be one of the more creative people that I know. She wanted to make her website look nicer, feel more organised, hold her portfolio and represent her identity. She got too caught up in too many things and, sadly, came up some really run of the mill stuff. I told her so, and she tried again, but after going at it for quite some time I think she gave up.

Her new portfolio is now online, and in IMO, is as bland as the oatmeal that I eat every morning. Doesn’t come even close to the standards that I hold her up to.

I just stumbled upon this totally radical CV created by designer Greig Anderson – check it here.

It immediately made me think of my friend.

Published on: August 25th, 2010

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Posted in Caught my click

Navjot Pawera (aka Nav)

UX, UI, Product design guy. These days, I'm working on creating new stuff at Bubble Motion. I am a silent partner at ExtraThought - a user experience design consultancy. I also curate the IXD Sessions in Singapore.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

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