When designing a mobile app, the focus should be on ease of use and user experience.
You need to put yourself in the user's shoes, and imagine what they would want out of the app.
What do I want it to do? How do I want it to behave? How would I prefer to navigate it?
Below are slideshows of different mobile app projects. Use either the arrows or dots to peruse them at your leisure.
Aspire is your all-in-one app to help you plan and organize your life so you can achieve your dreams and goals in life. The tagline for this app "Wish+Plan=Dream Life" is a play on the quote: "A dream without a plan is just a wish," by Katherine Paterson.
Aspire is a very utilitarian app with branding guidelines that are, in essence, clean and simple. Photographs and art are kept to a minimum, as too much would easily clutter the screen and detract from the app's true purpose. Color is the only mechanism for telling each section apart, and it can be customized in settings (for demonstration purposes, I gave each section bold contrasting colors).
Aspire is an extraordinarily customizable personal planner and organizer app. As such, it requires the user to create an account, so that all your settings can be saved. Once you login, the home page greets you with the latest news and notifications, in order of most recent. The menu may seem bland at first, but watch what happens once you tap on one of the tabs.
The tapped tab and the overhead of the menu change color to match the section you are about to enter. In the calendar section, you start with a view of the full current month. The diamond indicates the current day, while the little stars indicate that one or more events takes place that day. The user can tap to delve deeper, learn, create, and edit.
The classic to-do list allows the user to create multiple lists, specify their priority, and even set up alerts to remind them to do something. An icon accompanies each list, adding a fun pop of visual interest.
The notes section is where the user can scribble down (or more accurately, type) all their wild ideas and important information. Organized by last edited (by default, the sorting can be changed), each note has a title that the user puts in, and a small preview of the written content. Tapping a note leads to a full view of it where edits can be made. If the user wants, they can send the note to an email, DropBox, or even social media via the upload icon.
Meetings are their own animal, and in order to get a proper wrangle on them, it's best to give them their own section separate from the calendar. This is the place for the user to keep track of all their meetings, be they work-related, volunteer jobs, or hobby groups.
Special Events & News is the most robust section of the app. First, the user tells Aspire what organizations and activities they want to follow. The app then scours the web and social media for related events, activities, sales, deals, updates, tickets, and more. It pulls the information directly from the official sites, then organizes it for the user's convenience, even retrieving logos and official art to help the user recognize it at a glance.
Washington Distilleries is a real organization. They already have a website, but not an app yet. With this project, I set out to not only create an app, but also to try my hand at rebranding them. All I really had to work with was a name, a tagline, and the dedication to spirits (as in alcohol; not ghosts). I decided on a contemporary theme, and ran with it. Washington Distilleries is about a lifestyle, one where you have a passion for hand-crafted small-batch spirits. To help convey that lifestyle, the app is filled with striking photography of the drinks themselves and the events associated with them.
The app has an animated loading screen, in which a mystery spirit bottle is pouring the viewer a shot. The shot fills as the app loads. Once the app has loaded and the user has logged in, the home page greets them with the latest from their friends and favorite distilleries.
This section allows the user to search for a particular distillery, either through a map or an alphabetical list of all the distilleries that are members of Washington Distilleries. Whichever way they do it, once the user finds the one they want, the app provides the official logo, a description, and contact information for that distillery. Tapping the address sends that information to and opens Google Maps so that the user can get directions.
The Spirits section is for when the user is looking for a specific type of spirit, but don't know where to find it. Again, they have the choice of either using the map to see if it's nearby, or an alphabetical list of every spirit made by the member distilleries of Washington Distilleries.
We're not quite done with the Spirits section yet. This continuation from the previous slide demonstrates what would happen if the user decided to search with the list. When they choose a type of spirit, it takes them to a list of the distilleries that produce it. The user can select which one they want and learn where to get it. Tapping the address sends that information to and opens Google Maps so that the user can get directions.
The Tours section is precisely what you think it is. Not all the distilleries who are members of Washington Distilleries give tours, but the ones that do are listed here. The user can tap the one they want to visit and receive details, hours, and contact information. Much like addresses and Maps, tapping the phone number will open the Phone app with the number pre-entered so that the user can easily call to ask questions.
Speaking more personally for a moment, it was surprisingly fun learning the terminology to build this section. There's so much, it almost feels like the industry has its own language. I created three subsections to organize it all for the user. There are a lot of special words and terms to know in the world of spirits, and this is a great place to learn them.
The first subsection of Terminology, Spirit Definitions, provides precise definitions of each spirit. In addition, it spells out the word phonetically and contains an audio file so that the user can learn how to pronounce the word; it gives the origin of the word; and it shows a photograph of the spirit.
The second subsection of Terminology, Bartender Lingo, gives the user a rundown of all the slang terms used by bartenders and savvy patrons to describe how a drink is to be prepared and served. Detailed meanings and an accompanying photograph give the user all the answers they need.
The third subsection of Terminology, Alcohol Vocabulary, is essentially a list of terms used to describe certain ingredients and processes in distilling, as well as to describe the alcoholic potency of a spirit.
The Washington Distilleries app has its own built-in social media network, where the user can create a profile, post about their favorite drinks and distilleries, write reviews, invite friends to spirit events, adjust settings, and even share out to other social media.
