Core utility apps process update

Well done to everyone working on the core utility apps – we’ve made amazing progress so let’s celebrate that!

We all want to see what’s coming up so here’s a summary of where we have been, where we are now and where we are going in our design process.

Right hand side image : our typical user experience design process.

Where have we been?

Scope and objectives

We started with a call for core app proposals from the Ubuntu Community team which received great responses! We chipped in on the effort and started thinking about our strategy for apps which we see as core utilities for Ubuntu Touch.

What we really want to do with these utilities is not just to make them work, but to use them as an opportunity to explore and express our Design Vision:

• Focus on the content
• Fast and natural interactions
• Sophisticated style

Based on these we set out to establish the most essential user needs. Development began, laying the groundwork for envisaged functionality.

Research, concept development and requirements

We undertook different research activities to understand what we want these apps to do:

• Researched mobile app usage and behaviours
• Looked at our competitors – What are people using? What works and what doesn’t work?
• Workshopped design ideas in the office and in the community

Read more here.

What emerged from all this research and exploration? Rituals.

We then wireframed key user journeys to unpack these concepts:

• Calendar
• Calculator
• Clock
• Weather

Where are we now?

Visual exploration

Our Visual designers are looking at both inspirational designs, and what it means for an app to feel Ubuntu.

Iterative prototyping

Through hangouts, irc chats and emails with our community developers, sharing ideas and feeding back on design and development, we have iterated the concepts. Throughout this process we’ve taken the opportunity to use real code to prototype ideas for everyone to play around with on an actual device. The progress we have made already is astounding! For example, here is how the Clock, Calendar and Calculator were shaping up at the start of last week:

Nekhelesh Ramananthan has posted a video of his teams latest work on the clock app here too.

(Weather is coming soon too!)

Where are we going next?

From here we will be iterating our designs through Launchpad to capture bugs for development and design. We will soon be testing the prototypes with users and sharing visual designs to communicate style of the apps from textures to layout of information.

After a fair amount of iteration, we will have both functional and aesthetically beautiful apps!