Author: gisunglee

I designed “food art app”(I don’t have a name right now..)

the purpose of the app is to make food art into a hobby, so many people can join the community and make something fun to look at. There are lots of people ordering food and take pictures before they eat, so it looks like a piece of art. So I searched food art app, but there was no specific app that has a tutorial of making a food art. Also, normally people think it’s too hard to make the food into an art. So I want to focus on making a simple food art app that generates ideas to make a simple food art with everyday food materials.

food art app presentation

I reviewed one of the interesting app that is named “paper53”, it is a drawing app that has a simple interface.

app thursdayplays review

here’s a pdf

there are several things that I noticed while studying the IOS design guide lines. I also looked at material design by google, but in this post, I will focus on the IOS interface.

 

— By default, all bar buttons are borderless.

It is interesting to see all the guide lines that apple suggested, one of them was
normally, if you are a user, you don’t pay a lot of attention to design, you pay more attention to whether it functions well, and is it simple enough to use it. I was one of them, and I realized even though without a borderline, it can also distinguish between bar button by color. Also, the texture of the bar button(if you have one,) can make content distinguishable with contents too.

 

–Today’s date remains highlighted and the year appears in the back button, so users know exactly where they are, where they came from, and how to get back.

One of the things that I noticed was when a user tries to go to the view or function of what they want and if the path does not exist or the path is too hard for the user to find out, user gets frustrated. He will less likely to use an app. That what I do, when I download an app, I want to test to see if the app have what I want ; for example, I downloaded an app to write something quickly, but if the app requires me to tap 3-4 times to write something simple, I would not use the app.  I believe “paper53” is well-designed, and also has a good path of navigating one to another. Designers have to vision the path that a user will take for the first time, and simplify what is the most important reason for the user to use this app and what is the function that the user want. So the user can quickly access the function whenever they want.

 

—users navigate by making one choice per screen until they reach their destination.

This is what I do when I download a new app. After hitting the destination, I want to go back to where I was. Designers(I was a designer) tend to focus more on the interface than the path that a user will take, but thinking of the path and function first and integrate with interface design will make them a better designer.