iPad App Design
Since April 2010 the iPad tablet computer running the iPhone OS has revolutionised the portable devices market and caused all of competitors to scramble to produce anything close to the usability and functionality for the price. Initially mocked as “just a big iPhone”, the iPad has roughly 4 times the screen area of the iPhone but has become beloved of the home user and corporate for is portability, fantastic screen and sheer joy to use. The recently announced iPad2 will cement the iPad brand as the premier tablet device.
The increased screen size offers app designers and developers not only more space to work with but also a variety of new user interface capabilities to take advantage of this.
The major UI changes include:
- Side-by-side views to allow master-details view (like Windows file manager)
- Wider toolbars at the top or bottom of the screen allowing more items to be shown
- Popovers allowing data to be shown above the current view in a temporary fashion making for better interactive menus or quick-picker type palettes.
- Better gesture recognition
For corporate users the iPad changes allowed:
- File and document support that was needed for business applications
- Inbuilt support for PDF creation to generate reports and documents
- Support for external displays such as projectors for presentations
Solvd can help design a better and more iPad specific application that just a “big iPhone” app for you and your customers, truly leveraging the extras that are available on this platform.
The App Design Process
Our designers will discuss the project goals, requirements and what iPad application and design variations will be made for the iPad to fully utilise its extra capabilities.
We then formalise these ideas into the project brief and submit this to the customer so all parties know what the project goals and endpoints are.
Sovld develop use cases for the App to identify how the system will be used and the type of people using it. These use cases drive the design on app usability, the flow of control in the system and how the App screens flow together. During this phase we a stencil based system to allow us to rapidly re-design and visualise the on-screen elements needed and how the iPad App will flow. This iterative process is based on our knowledge of the iPad user interface elements to allow a specific iPad App that makes the best use of the hardware.