The Sleeper Project

To help teach myself good iOS design I will apply what I am learning to current projects. The first project is redesigning The Sleeper, an app released by Morphosis Games (the company I helped found). My brother, the iOS programmer, created this app several years ago for our sister who wanted a sleep timer. She likes to listen to audiobooks and music as she is falling asleep, but didn’t see any sleep timer function on her new iPod Touch. So, like a good brother, he made the app for her.

That was back in 2009, since then we have made very little improvements on The Sleeper. We’ve added an alarm feature, and made basic updates to keep the app functional, but nothing else. Now, after several years, I have decided to spend time redesigning the application’s interface in an effort to learn good iOS design.

First, a walk through of what the app looks like now. Expect future posts to show the changes and explain the process I use to redesign the application.

By the way, all the slides were done using PowerPoint. If find this to be a simple yet effective way to illustrate most of what I am doing.

Good Design or Bad Design?

Welcome to my new blog. Here is a little background about myself. I have been involved in designing iOS apps since 2009. Since then, I have help build several different apps. My job was to work on the design and the graphics. At the time I thought the apps were well designed and easy to use. Now, I'm not so sure.

Honestly, I have very little experience designing applications or user interfaces. I have dabbled in web design and database interfaces a little in the past, but not enough to really know anything. My experience designing mobile apps is at the same level. It was only recently that I decided I should start spending some time researching and teaching myself what good iOS design looks like.

That leads me to the purpose of this blog. I am an iOS Designer, yet I could not tell you the difference between good design or bad design. This is bad news for my business partners and for my customers. So, I am going to learn the difference, post my hypothesis and results on this blog, and hopefully meet other iOS Designers that will benefit from my trial and error.

With that said, let me turn to my first "textbook." Apple's Human Interface Guide (also called the HIG as I have been told). The HIG is the designer's guide to good design. Over the next few weeks expect to see posts about my findings and my experiments in good iOS design. Well, HIG we go...