Yodlee came to EchoUser needing to create a financial iOS mobile app for the Fall Finovate 2013 conference. Working with Yodlee's UX director, a visual designer, I, the UX designer, quickly refined and redesigned the mobile application from the ground up. With about 6 weeks to create the design, prototype, and rehearse the demo-ware, we worked at a quick pace to make the conference deadline.
Being new to designing and prototyping for mobile, there were tons of new learnings. Aside from ramping up, I encountered a couple of hurdles and challenges.
Here are some solutions and tips to the challenges we faced:
- What prototyping tool can we use to allow for all the cool touch gestures such as pinch to zoom, or swiping right? The answer is: Proto.io. It's an awesome web application that lets you quickly wireframe and prototype for mobile devices ranging from iOS, Android, to tablets. Learning how to use the tool was relatively easy to pick up, and you can upload final mockup files, creating a pretty realistic prototype. You can customize your own resolutions as well, and theoretically it can prototype for any device including alarm clocks, cars, and even refrigerators!
- How can we get the prototype to run as a native iOS app. on a mobile device offline, without compromising on speed? Conferences are notorious for bad internet connections, so we wouldn't want to depend on it for the demo. The prototype was typically viewed in a browser from a link, accessed via the interweb. Even if we exported the html files, and viewed it from DropBox or some file sharing application, it would open the prototype in a browser which would take away the native app. experience. We found ProtoSee, an iOS app was essentially created to view off-line HTML prototypes. They have great options in customizing the native app. icon, as well as changing the splash screen. It was relatively easy to download the prototype into the app./device, and customize the view settings.
