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I've been buildings apps with iOS and other mobile platforms since 2008. What started out as a hobby has been a full-time job for almost a year and a half.
Very recently I've had the opportunity to work with Johan Ronsse (who I will call Wolf in the rest of this blogpost) of Wolf's Little Store. We met via Twitter, sent a few mails back and forth and finally met in real life. Wolf designed a tourist guide for iPhone that we are currently working on and we will very likely work together on a few iPad apps as well. More on those in future blogposts.
A couple of weeks ago we enjoyed a meal together and talked about apps, other platforms, designing, World Champion hairdressers, the growth of Wolf's Little Store and we compared Antwerp and Ghent as cities to work and live in.
During that talk I said to him:
Recently Wolf blogged about design and the compromise thereof, which is one the reasons why I feel design is hard. There's other reasons but I'll discuss those in the future.
When we started the design work on the tourist guide development was 90% complete. We had a pretty good idea of the flow of the app, which screen would open which other screen, what data would be visualized and so on.
I'm not a fan of customers interfering with the development process. Building code is what we do and we do it well. Our greatest work happens when customers sign a price quote and when specs are fixed.
I like to treat our designers the same way.
I have a nice collection of favorite designs in Dribbble but I don't remember showing any of them to Wolf. Apart from app requirements that are absolutely necessary I want to be as invisible as possible in the design process. Ideal for me is to have a conversation with the designer, show what we have, explain what the end result should be and leave it at that.
The tourist guide we're building has the inevitable collection of Points of Interest. The user can get detailed POI information via a detail screen. This screen contains information like images, info about the POI, opening hours, website, mail address and so on. During the design process mails went back and forward. One particular mail from Wolf made me smile. It said something like:
I can't remember what exactly I replied but it was something like "I know. You've got a clean sheet for that one."
Typing that response felt really good because at that point in time I was completely invisible between designer and result. Even better was we got a great design back, that allows users to flick photo's on and off the screen. We used some clever Core Animation to achieve what Wolf had in mind.
It was creativity at its best.
The downside to being invisible is I might end up not liking what the designer built. That doesn't make it a bad design. That just makes it a design I don't like. In a way there was some luck involved in getting a design back that we really liked.
I'm still struggling on finding that perfect middle ground between being invisible/giving total freedom and giving a lot of guidelines, which turns the designer into a design monkey (read Wolf's blogpost for more info on design monkeys)
I've been giving this a lot of thought in the last few weeks. There is no one solution. What it comes down to is the kind of app I want designed. Based on reality I find there's 3 categories.
- Apps that are customer work and need to follow a house-style
- Apps that need to follow some guidelines
- Apps free of guidelines
Let's discuss these in detail.
The first category of apps makes me very visible in the design process. I have a house style from the customer's company that usually involves a logo, colors and sometimes other artwork. The customer wants his app to resemble his housestyle/website so that users of the app feel right at home.
This is the most limiting in the designer's creativity. The designer's sandbox of what's allowed becomes very small. It is a matter of sticking to strict guidelines, yet at the same time try to get some originality in the design.
I'd say the tourism app we built together was a category 2 design, for 2 reasons. First of all we are working with a content provider for the POI's so we needed an About screen in there that showed both companies' logo's. Second reason is basically the app itself. Tourism apps aren't new and it's hard to do things really different from the other apps. There's bound to be POI's in there, a map that shows them, a POI detail screen and so on.
The third category is what I call "clean sheet designs". This usually involves apps that are my own ideas, something that I want to build, an idea that I want to turn into reality. It often involves finding a name, building a logo and creating a house style all from scratch.
When I'm working on this type of app, I try to block everything design wise from my head. I want to be as invisible as possible in the design process. This involves risk because I might not like what the designer comes up with. However, as you get to know your designer a bond of trust forms. As trust grows, it becomes easier to leave your comfort zone and to trust the designer to deliver the goods.
This relationship of trust and getting to know each other takes some time. Sometimes I push a designer by keeping specs very vague. Sometimes the design pushes me, because it's not always easy to do a pixel perfect conversion of a design into the final product.
But this is a good thing.
Pushing others and being pushed by others makes sure you both grow and you end the project with more baggage than you had at the start, ready to move on to bigger and better things.
