#lovelyui

http://lab.hakim.se/

How many times have you left your out-of-town guests waiting with their luggage on the airport curb because you were stuck in traffic? I've done it more times than I'd like to admit (sorry, mom!) and it's about time I stopped making excuses and took measures to make sure I'm there on time to greet my guests properly.

If you're like us, here at Citrrus, (i.e., obsessed with gadgets and technology) you'd go on a research rampage to find the perfect app that will make you a better person solve your everyday problems. I came across this little gem called Just Landed on one of our creative team's favorite inspirational UI sites and threw it into our Creative Throwdown ring for some hearty debate.

As you will see from our grades below, this app crushed our critique and passed our tests with flying colors.  Yep,  these guys thought hard about the use-case and didn't skimp on the details—both from a performance and UX standpoint—making it hard to find areas for improvement. Here's the highlight reel of the throw down:

We adore:

Dynamic Call-to-Action Button: Just Landed shows clutter who's boss by intelligently serving up a happy little "track flight" button only when the user has input a minimum number of characters to define a flight. Clever little way to get onto the users' good side. 

Subtle Animation: There is a serious lack of purposeful animation in apps these days—unless, of course, you're a gaming app. Just Landed took the initiative to add little nuggets of awesomeness—like gently moving clouds, a tiny jet that soars across the sky, and a charming in-flight aerial animation loop—that exist to enhance your in-app experience. Bravo!!!

Familiar Sounds: If you're playing with this app (which you should be by now) and haven't turned on your sound—you're seriously missing out. Just Landed incorporates some of the most familiar (and high-quality) sounds anyone who's ever flown will recognize <ding!> and tastefully applied them to trigger on apropos events (like when it's time to leave for the airport). Way to set the bar high for other app makers like us...we're up to the challenge!

Beautiful on the Inside: It goes without saying that this UI is dripping with beauty, but what we really want to call out is the developer's attention to performance. They managed to make a beautiful app that has useful features and functions like a dream—all without draining your battery. They inventively found performance workarounds to the device's native tendencies to drain battery doing GPS queries. From one developer to another, we give you a friendly fist bump for taking the high road to innovate with the user in mind.

Suggested Improvements:

Countdown to Go-Time: While beautiful, the orange "counter" letting you know when to leave for the airport doesn't deliver a lot of information to the user. In fact, it's downright confusing. I mean, is it filling up or counting down? Who knows. Also, it barely moves as each minute counts down—isn't this supposed to help create urgency so I stop dilly-dallying and get my butt out the door in time? We'd suggest making it more clear that this thing is counting down (direction change, animation, ticker, SOMETHING) and blast an air horn flash it when I'm at (or well past) the time when I should leave.

Handle more than one flight: I'm willing to bet there are families like mine scattered across the globe and who try to coordinate landing times so that the local host doesn't have to make multiple trips to the airport. Until I found Just Landed, I used another flight tracker app that allowed me to simultaneously track the status of my family's various flights—dear Just Landed developer reading this blog, can you make that happen in a future update?

Keep it in the Family: It's really unfortunate that I have to leave this beautiful app to get driving directions to the airport. What if the flight gets delayed or something happens while I'm on my way? Hey Just Landed: Did you know that the iOS map is one of a handful of native iOS APIs that you can actually open within your own app? Missed that tutorial, did you? Consider this our formal request to add that in to the next update.

So, the next time you plan a visit I promise never to be late picking you up at the airport—unless, of course, I have trouble finding my keys. I wonder if there's an app for that?

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