User Experience of The Humble Converter App
We spend a lot of time looking at iPhone apps these days and it’s very clear that the user experience can be the difference between someone buying an app or not.
Marc posted about the importance of creating the right impression within the App Store . I wanted to write here briefly about how the app itself then needs to continue with creating the right impression through its UX.
As example, lets take the simple ‘converter’ app – you know, the one you download because you need to convert Fahrenheit to Centigrade, or Miles to Kilometers? It could be seen as a ‘boring utility’ by many, but user experience design can still make one app stand out over another.
I’ve downloaded a couple of converters and one that I really liked was Convertbot. With Convertbot the designers have really crafted the user experience. They have considered everything from the icon onwards and made it feel seamless and clean to use.
When you start the app, the loading screen is a metallic/industrial-feeling ‘shutter’ with animation – this then leads nicely into a main screen which maintains the industrial feel and where users simply spin a wheel of icons to choose what type of conversion they want to make – length, weight, etc.
Putting that in the context of other converter apps its clear to see that Converbot user experience is more considered from a design perspective.
Take a look at the two screens here from two different converter apps. This is the main screen where the user chooses their conversion and enters what they want to convert.
Convertbot keeps it very simple – the user just flicks the wheel to select what they want to convert. Convertbot also reduces complexity by offering the user either the wheel or the keypad – depending on the context they are in. This reveals the complexity as needed rather than attempting to fit everything onto one screen.
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July 10th, 2009 at 10:01 am
User Experience should not be solely about how good it looks – you have overlooked raw usability and productivity.
The Converter app makes it much clearer and quicker for an “inexperienced with technology” user to see what they need to do to convert values. This is helped by the familiar “iPhone” blue arrow links. Once the user wants to do the conversions, there is no need to leave the screen / bring up an input keyboard.
Also, it may not be immediately apparent to the inexperienced user that the Converterbot has a spinning wheel – the bottom section of the wheel stays static, and when they do see that it spins, there is no text to clarify the meaning of the mystery symbols until they are selected.
From this point of view, the User Experience of the Converterbot has failed, even though it’s clearly more visually interesting and “designed”.
Having said that, your point about making the app stand out is absolutely correct – I would pick convertbot over converter simply because it looks better.