Organizing UX for Large Scale Mobile Apps

Just wanted to share a few pics of the inter-workings of designing a large scale app that crosses vast social media integration and numerous content touch points. A considerable amount of time is put into organizing, structuring and designing such a product so that it will make sense for end users and appear simple and easy to use.



Forgoing these steps at this level will ensure confusion and ultimately the absence of returning users to your ecosystem. I have taken traditional website building methods and modified them to develop a system of what I am calling a 'Tap Map'. Very similar to a site map, but in this instance you can easily see where particular parts of the app are nested inside each of other and how many taps deep a particular piece of content is. This also allow certain pieces of information to be accessed in multiple ways inside the app without having flow lines and arrows running wild.

Mobile is definitely a different animal and as such the traditional web way of tackling things no longer makes as much sense. Within the confines of iOS and android each screen has to have special attention paid to it whereas in many web design instances content flows more freely and design is more about building buckets to drop things in. A few dozen page designs for the web will quickly turn into a few hundred for an app if attention to detail is taken into account. Adding touch and gestures to the user experience changes the architecture and every element has to fit in a particular place within the fixed dimensions of the screen. Links and more info to come soon - once this product is launched. Big stuff on the way, stay tuned.

Skewing Truth With Design

Dartmouth College Political Scientists recently released a report saying that infographics might be the best way to alter peoples beliefs about a particular subject. More specifically, they were looking at two items, 1. "people tend to resist unwelcome information", and 2. "whether graphical corrections may be more effective than text" at changing peoples minds. What they found: "Graphical corrections are also found to successfully reduce incorrect beliefs among potentially resistant subjects and to perform better than an equivalent textual correction."

Well, duh! Designers have known this for decades. This is how we get you to buy a coke, think Target clothes are cool and convince you to buy a product you don't need. Design is a visual solution to deliver information. However, when that information is handled poorly or in a misleading manner it becomes propaganda.

Bloomberg's Businessweek created a nice example of how easy it is to visually skew non-related data to mislead consumers into false conclusions. These are pretty funny but they do illustrate a real truth of how design could transform into propaganda.



One of my favorite books dealing with this issue is by Edward R Tufte. In The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Tufte deals extensively with the propensity of designers to unknowingly (or knowingly) skew data when compiling it visually. Trying to make data fun or decorative lends itself to creating propaganda if the information is not properly cared for and treated with great respect.





Tufte goes into great detail along with real world examples of how data should be treated and displayed to attain the most unbiased positions possible. An obvious must read for anyone creating infographics, but more importantly a must read for anyone who is interested in being able to recognize false information and disseminate the truth.

Obviously people look at graphics before digging into text. We are visual creatures. The old example was a newspaper - have you ever read the entire thing, or just flipped through to find something interesting? Now its, do you read all the text on all the websites you visit - or just look for something interesting and then dig in? Why does a book have a fancy cover and not simply the first page of text from the book?

A better study for Dartmouth might have been to calculate the percentage of false information that is communicated through misleading graphics instead of trying to decide if design works.

Before Info Graphics Were Trendy…

Back in 2005, I designed AT&T's Mass Marketing Creative Process for both Online Marketing and Direct Mail. The purpose was to keep our team on track and ensure consistent check points for quality control. We printed these out large scale and hung them in conference rooms for reference.

In retrospect, I would have changed some things. However, considering the time period and level of granularity I won't be too harsh on myself. I believe at one point this made a guest appearance in Comm Arts. Full size version here.

Creativity in Business

The word "creative" is an all encompassing term of what we do and how we interact, both personally and in business.



Companies live and die by these primary principles which are all rooted in creativity:

1. The funding necessary to create a product or service
2. The value and quality of the good or service created
3. The effectiveness of marketing the product
4. The experience a consumer has when interacting with the product
5. The likelihood of a consumer to recommend the product to others.

All of these variables are dependent on "creative". Will investor/board presentations effectively communicate the business goals? How will the product or service be designed and built? How will the product be marketed and advertised to consumers in a multitude of ways? What will the actual experience a consumer has with the product be? How likely will consumers be to share it with others? And how will the process be repeated to make continual improvements?

Design & creativity is intrinsic in the core of any business. Often though a business's drive for revenue can usurps this necessity, and lead the company to failure if it is not acted on by an outside force. This is why "fresh blood" is brought in and new thought-leadership is required. The customer is still king, and the product or service still exists for them - more so now than ever as every company and product is discussed and shared instantly with both positive and negative results.

If a product or service remains consumer focused, it will succeed. This is often why new leadership is needed at a company, or the leadership that exists should be continually focused on building a better product - not just a better profit. The profit and product are eqully dependent on one another.

A example of this is Apple Computers and Microsoft. The once tiny Apple facing the giant continually focused on the customer and innovative products while Microsoft focused on profits. Now we view Apple as one of the most successful, innovative and design-centric companies ever and continue to see Microsoft lose ground.

"Creative" is essential to having a successful business. A holistic design-centric approach can be the differentiating factor in ultimate success or ultimate failure.