2016–2017
Visual and Interaction Design
iOS and Android
Trapit's existing mobile app was limited in functionality, and used a single design across both iOS and Android. On top of that, if hid the the main functionality - sharing articles out to your social networks - behind a swipe gesture.
As a big proponent of Luke W's "Obvious always wins" philosophy, I wanted to elevate the visibility of that core functionality, and lay the foundation for upcoming features while making the apps feel at home on their respective platforms.
With such a small, agile team, we were able to think about upcoming features in a holistic sense and consider their cross-platform implementation. So, when I started white-boarding with my engineers, I knew that we were planning on features like posting to multiple networks at once, and the ability to add items to a sharing queue.
In enterprise software, while you usually have close relationships with your admin users, there can be quite a disconnect from the end users. We looked at Flurry analytics and found that most users were sharing from the home screen, meaning that they never actually went into the article. This lead to the idea of a 'quick share' action. When a user doesn't need to specify a custom message, they can quickly add an item to their queue for later sharing. The ability to customize the messaging is still available through the traditional sharing method.
We were adding a lot of functionality to our core sharing mechanic. I wanted to keep the main flow as close to status quo as possible to prevent causing friction for casual users.
I kept the wireframes at this stage very low-fidelity. Sketching allowed me to explore a wide range of implementations without a huge time investment. I used Principle to make a tappable prototype in order for us to get a sense of how it felt on-device.
While the core sharing mechanic remained the same on iOS and Android, we wanted to leverage platform conventions where possible to make the users feel at home. This manifested itself in a few areas, most notably the main navigation. On iOS, we leverage the tab bar to keep visibility high for our new features. On Android, we use a navigation drawer for those main sections.
We also use OS-specific conventions on the article pages. Contextual actions moved from their former location at the top of the screen, to an easier to reach toolbar on iOS. Meanwhile, we used the Primary Action Button on Android to focus on sharing.
Trapit was acquired by ScribbleLive in May 2017, and we lost our mobile developers in that transition. This feature should move into production soon.
We'll use a combination of direct customer feedback, app store reviews, and Flurry analytics to inform future changes.