This week, RJ Owen, Leonard Souza and I presented a multiscreen app we built for Adobe MAX. The app was a “social jukebox” that lets party attendees play a role in DJing the party. That is, they can vote for the songs they want to hear at the party and songs with the most votes get pushed higher in the song play queue. We built a touch-enabled desktop app that acts as the “host” for the music and then there is a mobile app that allows people to interact with the desktop application.
The apps were fun to build and we used a number of Adobe technologies to pull them off. We’re hoping to keep pushing the multiscreen experience to include TV using Adobe AIR and an app for iOS. In the meantime, you can check out the images of the app in this post, our slide deck and our presentation on Adobe TV as soon as it’s available. We hope to follow up with a series of blog posts on how we built these apps.
Communicating thoughts and ideas can be one of the biggest challenges in an industry that relies so heavily on visual interpretation and recognition. If you’re working on an idea by yourself, with a colleague or a client, it’s one thing to see an idea in your mind and another to get it out for others to evaluate. As a UX designer, sketching is a daily necessity. It’s one of the most valuable tools you can wield.
At EffectiveUI, we recognized just how important sketching is that we made custom EffectiveUI sketchbooks. They’ve evolved over the years in design and purpose. These sketchbooks were extremely popular within the company and beyond. When we’d visit clients they’d come to meeting with their EffectiveUI sketchbook in hand.
Then, along came the iPad. Everyone at EffectiveUI was excited about this new magical device. In fact, the concept for Ideate was born when Jonathan Branam gave me a call out of the blue exclaiming, “I want to build an iPad application”. After some brainstorming we decided to bring all the usefulness of our EffectiveUI sketchbooks to the iPad. We named the app “Ideate”.
Why take something so simply splendid and make it digital? Well, we wrestled with that a bit. Believe me, I love the smell of Sharpies as much as the next person. Give me a black pen and a highlighter and I can share ideas with the best of them. However, there are limitations that I kept experiencing when using good ol’ pen and paper. Those were the things we were looking to eliminate with Ideate. We weren’t looking to replace the sketching experience, but enhance it.
Every time I want to share a sketch I go to our copier/scanner, scan my sketch and email it to myself. I then email that on to someone. Or, I use my iPhone to snap a picture, but if lighting is bad, my sketch looks bad and that’s not good. It was this experience that drew us to making sharing sketches easy. The thought of sharing sketches right from my iPad to Flickr or via email really excites me.
Another thing I would do is draw out a template as a base for what I would be sketching and then make multiple copies to sketch on. For example, to accurately represent an idea for multiple states of a web application I would draw out a web browser, make copies of that and then sketch over those copies. The custom EffectiveUI sketchbooks alleviated some of this, but we thought it could be even better. As a result, we incorporated a wide variety of Templates you can load as backgrounds and sketch right over them. Bye, bye copy machine.
For every design, there are always sources of inspiration. I always bookmark sites, take screenshots, clip magazines and maintain my own little inspiration library. We wanted to bring this idea into Ideate as well. The web is an infinite source of inspiration, so why ignore that? You can clip images from the web via Safari, bring in images from your Photo Library or access Clips that come with the application to use as reference, provide inspiration or add to your sketch.
Designing and building an iPad application was particularly interesting, especially because we didn’t have access to the device. To get over this hump, Jonathan fashioned a prototype of wood, paper and boxing tape. Lo-fi, yes, but also incredibly helpful. He also made it so you could slide different printed Templates in and out. This prototype helped us make some valuable decisions, like the placement of the pen tray. It’s placed there so you can quickly switch between pens with your thumb (if you’re right-handed) as your sketching, but expect customization soon.
The process of bringing this application together was completely agile and while we cut features we made sure the application was still useful. One of the things that really helped make progress was relying on the user interface elements and guidelines Apple gives you to work with. They put a lot of thought into the interface behind the iPad, so we leveraged that as much as possible.
Hand Template
One thing we found and didn’t really expect was how useful Ideate is for other industries. As we were working on the application people in the company mentioned the idea to their doctors, architect friends and teachers. What we found is that the same ideas around Templates, sharing and drawing as a communication tool resonated with so many people. This pushed us to make more custom Templates to support these use cases we came across.
The way this app came together was quite the experience and a real testament to the kind of talent I get to work with at EffectiveUI. It was amazing to see a short phone call turn in to a finished application so quickly. We had an in-house concept artist create the Templates and Clips, development happening in-between client work and design changing on-the-fly as user feedback rolled in. It was fun.
Thinking through an iPad application and seeing it built has done wonders to help me understand what it takes to make something for this new device. Will Ideate replace the familiar pen and paper? No. The application is another tool that can be used to support your own thought process. For myself, it’s something I’ve been waiting for.
Ideate is available in the App Store for $3.99. You can learn more about Ideate on the website or follow @ideateapp on Twitter.
I’m really excited to see this book up on Amazon. Everyone worked really hard to pull it together and I think it’ll be a great resource to add to the conversation of building great software. Don’t forget to pre-order.
This week, RJ Owen, Leonard Souza and I presented a multiscreen app we built for Adobe MAX. The app was a “social jukebox” that lets party attendees play a role in DJing the party. That is, they can vote for the songs they want to hear at the party and songs with the most votes get pushed higher in the song play queue. We built a touch-enabled desktop app that acts as the “host” for the music and then there is a mobile app that allows people to interact with the desktop application.
