Another sneek peek at the app I'm working on. You may have noticed by now there is more than a little UX/layout iteration going on in what are essentially high-fidelity comps.
“But Matt! You hate that. You are Mister Wireframe! What's going on? I'm scared and confused!”
When working with clients or at my day job, I usually swear by the wireframing and whitebox prototyping stages. Wiring and low fidelity prototyping are effective ways to iterate on the UX and structure the creative process to focus the team and stakeholders on the foundational design decisions that define a product or feature's experience. It allows the team and the stakeholders to really consider the information and functions being presented and not get hung up on button colors or other UI chrome... also, it just keeps the work required to iterate on core design minimal. Working six hours on a hi-fi comp to only discover there is a fundamental problem with the basic layout or product concept is just crazymaking — especially when a twenty minute wireframe revision could have proven out the same problem.
While i sometimes do wires for my personal projects, often I don't. The reason for this is easy: In many cases, the only stakeholder is me, and the deadlines are at my discretion. I can slow–revise the UI states as many times as I'd like. This is one of those projects. While there was some very basic sketchbook wireframing in the very early stages, for the most part I am iterating in high fidelity, and sometimes pre–sketching complex behaviors out in my notebook. It's a bit like working without a net, but also very freeing.
You can see i've dispensed with the high-style vaguely Clear–like UI effects. I've also dispensed with H&FJ's Vitesse. It all just felt too gimmicky for what I'm trying to build, and not particularly in harmony with the upcoming iOS7 UI design. The presence of the map element creates a certain “grounding” effect that really makes it feel inappropriate to do anything too fanciful, because in the end it still has to harmonize with whatever map service I'll end up using, and while I haven't ruled out a custom map service, focusing on styled maps feels like a tangental problem. And ultimately, when it comes to a transit app, people need clarity and consistency more than they need me to show off how avant–garde i can be.
This revision signals a return to Process Type Foundry's Locator — which I am still really enjoying. My earlier fear is that with a flat aesthetic I was drifting into Windows Phone territory using Locator, but I think the overall aesthetic is different enough that it'll work.
Earlier versions played with a floating circle design that I rather liked, and you'll see the circles for lines have been re-introduced. It took several revisions to realize though that the "floating" model needed to go, though. Visual collisions with the map markers made for some unpleasant visual cases, and instead of trying to “force” the design to work, I folded the line listing back into the prediction and line metadata grouping, which in truth creates a stronger relationship between those two elements.
I'm still trying to internalize the “rules” around both the visual conventions involved with iOS7 and the actual practical constraints around the new effects, like blurring...but that's another post
