In this second post of my blog series about Design Considerations When Building Cross Platform Applications, I’m focusing on what most people typically consider the only design consideration: Visual Design and User Experience. Usually when a product company is beginning to plan out a new product, the team goes through phases during which they start to innovate and scrutinize the idea, followed quickly by a design and/or prototype phase. This period is the starting point because it is really what helps the product managers – and in the long run the customers – visualize the product’s potential and how a user may use it. Some of the factors that are taken into account during this time period are the overall cosmetic design (including product consistency, simplicity and customization) and user interaction flow. While the designer begins to dig into the idea to put some parameters around the product, he must consider the company’s logos and colors as well as its current and future product suite. It is very important that each application delivered by the product company has a similar look to it so the user feels that consistency across all products in the suite.
In my experience at SuperConnect thus far, this approach rings true. We began our company with one designer and have been lucky enough to work with several others over our short lifespan. The result was initially a collection of various design approaches starting with a more web-centric design on a mobile device and evolving to the very clean and concise design we now use in our products. We see the consistency that a full-time designer and thought leader can provide to a suite of products that are meant to drive enterprise mobility. The catch, as there is always a catch, is that while our products may reflect the comprehensive and hard work of our team, customers still want to make their mark when deploying applications to the enterprise. To help our customers use SuperConnect products in a way that will accommodate and enhance their own brands, we have taken the approach of the 80/20 rule. We’ve built strict templates within our applications that guide the customer’s administrators to follow our designer’s ideas and plans, but still provide a bit of customization. One example lies in ourConnections application where we provide a unique look at the employee directory by allowing the customer to specify what data is displayed in the application. Our design provides an interface where the administrator can customize which data fields are displayed within different areas of the application based on specific templates that were defined by the designers. In the end, our design remains intact because we don’t allow the customization of font (color, size or type), the layout of the fields themselves or the locations of images within the app. However we do allow the administrator to choose which data field should be displayed in the various locations on those templates.
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