Posted on August 9, 2010 - by Wayne Sutton

Development Journal: New User Interface for TriOut iPhone app 2.0 coming soon

Guest Post by
Lawrence Ingraham @LawPower, Founder/Lead Developer for TriOut.

This is the first in a series of posts detailing the history, design and features of TriOut v2 for iPhone.

Last week you learned about the history of TriOut version 1. Today I’m going to share the first full image of TriOut version 2. But first, let me tell you how we got there. (sure you could scroll down and cheat, but where’s the fun in that?)

We ended up with a grid of 9 buttons in TriOut v1. We heard from users that the interface looked great, but was really confusing. Why would I tap on All Locations to search, why can’t I just search in the Nearby section. What is a Check In button after you’ve already checked in?

You’ll notice with everything we do in v2, simplicity is the number one concern. We want to make it easy for new users to figure out what to do. We want to make it fast for experienced users to get what they want and do what they need to do. It really takes launching a v1 to figure out what users want, and I think we’ve done that.

We also cheated a bit and released a mobile html5 web version earlier this year. The mobile version was a test for the user experience we were planning for v2. We cut down from the 9 buttons on the home screen to just 3; Location, People, Events. Search was integrated with the results and a check in could be done on any screen. Couldn’t be easier to figure out.

The results were overwhelmingly positive, but we still think we can improve on the experience. So without any further delay, here’s the first screenshot of TriOut v2.

You’ll notice the design resembles the standard iPhone tab bar user interface, but it’s a little different. We’ve stuck with three buttons for Locations, People and Events, but added two more. You’ll also notice the new status bar at the bottom of the screen.

I’m going to start next week by going into detail on the new status bar, there’s more there than meets the eye.

Let the speculation begin!

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