Hi, this is the Daily Overpass, my name is Eric and i make apps!
Now today I wanna talk about why design is crucial in apps!
Ok so today I wanna answer a question from Nicolai Weitkemper from last weeks video number
62, he asked "Can you talk about design?
What do you think about material design, Apple design, ...? Which one do you like the best?"
I know I've talked about design before, it's an important subject.
So, which one do I like better out of material design or Apple design?
I like material design.
I like the way that it looks, I think it's very slick, it's really nice, but one of my
problems with using something like material design or Apple design or using guidelines
like that is it's a lot like when think about the early days of Windows development, or
not that early.
So say the early 2000's, I was doing a lot of desktop app development.
So I had my Microsoft certification, so MCSD certification.
There are certain things, like design rules, that they teach you, so which controls you
should use for different things, the way things should look, how to organise things, ans we
all use the same tools.
We use visual basic or C++.
And everything looked the same.
Now the good part about having those guidelines was that these applications were very easy
to use, so it was easy for a user to go in and say ok, I'm gonna fill in this form, I
expect the submit button to be at the bottom or if I'm gonna have a tree view I'd expect
it to be over at the left or something like that.
And if you have somebody like a junior developer, not even a junior developer, sometimes it's
a senior developer...I remember one developer who said "I hate gooey, I'm not gonna do another
gooey ever in my life."
He just wanted to do surfer side stuff, which is cool.
So when they did the gooey they were just like, you know, whatever.
It's really hard to argue with somebody "I've been at this bank for ten years and they're
gonna do things the way I want".
It all works as technically as possible, but it's hard for the users to understand.
And you go sit at a users desk and they go "I don't know where to click, wheres the save
button?", and you go "It's up in the upper right hand corner", and they go "oh, that
doesn't make sense".
And I know, it doesn't.
So the nice thing about having guidelines like that, like material design and everything
like that is that it standardises the interface.
There was a really good book that came out a long time ago, it was Steve Krug's 'Don't
Make Me Think', and it was all about user interfaces and trying to make something work.
You wanna have the least resistance for your user using the application at all.
So they shouldn't go in there not being able to figure out what things do.
And if you use something like material design, they've used it in other apps too, so they
know that the hamburger menu's in the corner, if they click on that it expands the side
menu, they know certain things being in certain places, they know the difference between the
switch and the select and all that kind of stuff.
The problem with stuff like that, the same with windows in the early days, was pretty
soon all apps are to look the same.
You don't really have anything distinctive about your own application.
When it comes to design, but it's still important, you need to have those guidelines in place.
You need to be able to figure out if people don't know where to click...like for me, when
I talked about ear spy, I think I've told you about this, where they could add extra
features, so they could do in-app purchases but it was up in the menu, and it was using
the old action bar menu which is up in the right hand corner with the three dots. not
everybody was finding that, so it was something I had to change, i had to move that to the
front and then my purchases increased.
So design is something that is really important, but also something that we don't think about
a lot.
When I talked about those older developers -when I say older developers - it wasn't just
older developers, it was just sort of a "I'm right and everybody else is wrong", when you
talk to them about "what are we gonna name this application?" and they go, "we're gonna
call it the such and such database".
"Well I know, but we should give it a cool name".
"No, no, we're gonna call it such and such database", and it was just because they didn't
wanna mess with any of that touchy feely kind of stuff.
I said "ok, well shall we get an icon for it?", he said "no, default icon is fine".
So we put stuff out that was really just kinda ugly!
But when you look at google play, you see a lot of icons and designs that look like
the apps could be technically brilliant, but they haven't spent a lot of time in design.
Personally, I think that if you're a bad developer with good design skills, you're better off
than a great developer with bad design skills.
That's just the way I feel.
Because we have so much possibility, so much to choose from that when you find something,
you're gonna go to the one that looks the most professional, right?
Not necessarily the one that is the most professional.
i like to think of it like, let's say you go into a new city, you're looking for a place
to eat.
You're going out to a restaurant, and you're like, I don't know anything about any of these
restaurants.
I don't know anybody who's ever been here, nobody's given me a recommendation, and so
you look down the restaurant row, you look down the street, restaurants on both sides
and you look for the one that looks the nicest.
So you look for the one that has the nicest sign, the one that has the best atmosphere.
The food is what you're concerned with, but you can't go and try the food at every single
place, you go for the one that looks the best.
you could go to the restaurant that has the nicest atmosphere and the nicest sign, the
nicest menu, but the food is terrible, but across the street there could be the a class
chef where you could have the best meal that you've ever had in your life, but you're not
gonna go in there because they haven't spent any time on the atmosphere and the design,
they haven't spent enough time to get you in there.
On my team of six people, we have two full-time designers.
So, I think design is incredibly important.
When you're looking at a crowded market, like the app market, and you go and you type in
"learn swahili", and they see a bunch of apps come up and all they see is a list of icons,
they see the list of icons and they see the names, and they're gonna look for the nicest
looking icon.
They're either gonna go for the first one on the list, or they're gonna go for the one
that has the nicer looking icon because it looks the most professional.
So if they don't actually click on that, go in there, read the description, see the screenshots,
read the description and actually download, it doesn't matter what my app does.
i might as well not even have one.
You know like that old adage that says "if a tree falls in the woods and nobody's there
to hear it, does it make a sound".
I like to think, if an app is on the app market and nobody ever finds it, does it exist at
all?
It's being able to entice them in to download it which is really really important, and the
first time I hired a full-time designer, I was doing apps for a year, and I had such
a hard time with design.
We would put out a few apps and the design was just horrible on them, like the kind of
thing where you just putting it on the market and you think "I don't even wanna tell people
about this", because the first thing they say is "you know, you need a new icon".
I know, we've been through this over and over again with the designer.
Everything they come back with is bad.
This is the best of all the bad options I got.
It was so terrible, and it was demotivating.
You just sit there and you 're just like aaargh.
Because you can do a lot of good work and then you have a bad icon and the first thing
people do is they look at the icon.
Or they'll go "it's ok, it's alright".
So, when I first hired my first full-time designer, which was a guy, then I hired Sandee,
I was in a mastermind group with all these other developers.
Some of them were developers who had apps on the market, some of them were entrepreneurs
with apps on the market so they were very big on Odesk and all that kind of stuff, which
is fine.
I'm kind of a balance between the two of them.
Their whole thing was "yeah, I've thought about getting a designer, but do you really
need a full-time designer?!
Maybe we could go halves on a designer?
We could share a designer".
And I thought about that and I thought "No.
You know what?
I am gonna look for a full-time designer, because this is the kind of thing that we
just cannot do without.
this is crucial to everything.
We need to have somebody who can design an icon, a splash screen, characters in a game,
all that kind of stuff.
We need a few people like that, especially if we're gonna work for clients".
And in terms of sharing it with somebody else, I just didn't like the idea of that.
I thought I want a designer who works well with me, and not somebody we're just gonna
loan out to other people.
Who knows, they could be rude to the designer, all that kind of stuff, and I tend to be very
protective of the people on my team.
so that was it.
And our first major client project was a game.
We had a big client that wanted to have a game for a trade show.
So we sent them some initial designs and they were happy, they design was what got us the
job.
Once they saw the design, they knew that, ok these guys know what they're doing.
They didn't know anything about the code.
I could've said "oh yeah, here's a flowchart of how everything will work, but that's not
what they were interested in.
When I talked about scope creep before, design is definitely an area of scope creep.
that's an area where it is very iterative.
A Lot of times with our stuff, I'm happy early on.
I'm happy "Hey no that's fantastic, that's great" - I don't say exactly what I want,
I'll say the feel that I wanna get from it, which is one of the reasons I have to have
such a good connection with the developers.
I can't just have somebody on Odesk that I go to and see if they're available every once
in a while.
So we had this app, and the scope creep of this client project was that we had meetings
about...the character is too cute, the character is not cute enough, the bad guys are not scare
enough, the bad guys are too scary - we had all this kind of stuff.
Very subjective language.
So I keep going back to the designers and, iterating and coming up with lots of different
versions of kinds of stuff and spent a lot more time than I had quoted for on the design
side of things, which was cool.
I mean it's a learning experience.
But if I had somebody on Odesk that I had a fixed price job with, that wouldn't work
out.
So anyway, I'm rambling on here a bit more.
I think design is extremely important and it's one of the things that brings us in clients
all the time.
Tomorrow I'm gonna tell you what we do in our quotes that really helps bring in clients
in terms of design, and I think you'll find it really interesting.
But anyway, that's it for today, I will talk to you guys tomorrow!