John Gibbard

It’s not like I spend my day looking for cures for cancer, I just design and redesign digital experiences. Even so, when something you worked on, however small, gets genuine public attention including (justifiable) criticisms and joyous praise, it feels like a big deal.

So much of the day-to-day work is behind the scenes. Hours of screentime, meetings, sketching and commutes home with ideas buzzing in your head. Then it breaks the surface and with celebrity behind it, it leads to me spending an inordinate (and unbillable) amount of time monitoring the twitter streams fishing for compliments.

So that was myFry and that was yesterday. It occurred to me yesterday that this took place around an app that isn’t even free and, whilst it is undeniably popular, it is never going to be an Angry Birds (Rovio 6m+ sales) or even an ECB Cricket App (the OTHER media). Those apps reach the sort of population that – even ten years ago – would have been considered incredible sales records for the most successful of recording artists. In this day and age, a well-designed and popular app means your creativity is engaged with far beyond the single sales for Xfactor winners (< 0.5m units).

So that got me thinking a bit more (since I was involved on the outskirts of the hugely successful Waterslide and less successful Rollercoaster apps, both of which are free), does it matter more when the app is paid-for? The myFry app is nearly £8, it is hardly throwaway entertainment. Users rightly demand that such experiences work. As far as I can recall this was the first thing I have done which is directly paid-for by end consumers. Of course, sites I  have worked on are indirectly paid for as customers buy the products and services offered but the transaction is nevertheless perceptibly free, they have not just shelled-out cash to use the interface.

That customers have just paid for it means that they more-keenly feel the user-experience niggles (and there are some, both intentional and unavoidable) and feed these back into the AppStore reviews. It is these reviews that I care deeply about, the heartfelt feelings of the people I spent hours and hours designing-for and thinking about in front of my screen and sketchpad.

And there I will leave myFry, until I need to return for alternative versions, updates or any other development that Dare and Penguin see fit. You, dear reader, will only know more when such additional work becomes public.

My esteemed colleague Flo described it as what happens when “the stars align“, I separately described it as a ‘perfect storm’. This week Penguin launched myFry an iPhone app that we at Dare had been asked to create for Stephen Fry.

This was one of those projects which sets sparks off when the brief comes in. Already engaged on another app (this time more iPad than iPhone) for an established Penguin talent, word reached us that Penguin would like us to look at this Fry work – in an incredibly short space of time. As the days and weeks progressed we were fortunate (and I know this all sounds gushing) to be working alongside a client in Jeremy Ettinghausen who not only profoundly understood his client [Fry] but equally understood the capability and talents of his staff and his agency [Dare].

The first step was to meet and discuss with information artist Stefanie Posavec who was employed by Penguin as a cover artist and who’s extra-curricular work had caught everyone’s imagination. We discussed the taxonomy of the manuscript, the experience of Stephen Fry’s writing and ultimately the opportunities for an interaction. From some sketches and notes I took this work and began by laying out a visual of the manuscript, demonstrating how this could be tagged and chunked, how these chunks could form navigable elements and how we could represent relationships through the text.

This work went back to Stefanie, Jeremy and others at Penguin from which Stefanie produced conceptual visuals and the hard work of beginning to read, analyse and tag the book began. As this was an editoral task, this was best left to the publishing team (and Flo – see his tagging output) but it left myself (and I suspect Stefanie) nervously awaiting the outcome; utlimately the visualisation and interaction would be profoundly affected by how the book was re-cut. It is important to note here that nothing was removed from the manuscript or changed in ordering.

In the meantime, I began to work with Ron and Luke at Dare (both visual designers) to start to refine the interface layer, understand the interaction journeys and turn so-far static PSDs into beautifully engaging experiences. All the time we were working on this, Penguin and Flo were tagging away and the tech guys (James, Joe & Perry) were astonishingly already producing prototype experiences.

These tech prototypes were incredibly important to the project. They enabled us to see how the click-wheel navigation would work. The detail required in understanding how many ‘spines’ we could fit on the wheel to be usable for the majority of people on an iPhone was crucial to determining how many sections the book would be separated into. In prototyping this work the guys creatively developed the liquid ‘bounce’ feedback on the wheel which gave valuable feedback to the user as to where their finger was in relation to the wheel – something we were unlikely to solve in static IA/IxD.

As the days and weeks passed I continued to refine the screen flows for the app, demonstrating every single interaction from the point of clicking the app icon, reading in each conceivable scenario through to managing the internal app settings. We toyed with ideas such as a horizontal histogram view (rotate your phone to landscape to view the wheel stretched out in linear fashion) and we experimented with section-to-section navigation but each of these experiences were debated and eventually dropped. It is important to say that we thought as hard, about the stuff we dropped as we did about the stuff we kept.

I continued to learn about the limitations of iPhone development: (detail bit coming up) changing values in the central apps settings interface doesn’t affect the app until it is launched which means toggles rather than realtime action buttons, for example. As the real data came in our experts in tech began to work out a way of tying the design/IxD visuals together with the data to make it work and I performed some Excel analyses on the the outputs to establish how the live data would affect the visualisation patterns. Over time my role switched to reviewing and tweaking interactions, consulting to ensure that the final build stayed close to the original concept and, eventually, on the 10th September (my birthday) the app was approved.

In general, it simply could not have happened this way without the enthusiasm, collaboration and skill of everyone involved. In my vocation we spend a stupid amount of time redefining our job titles: IA/IxD/Ux etc. etc. What I can say is that this job gave me full exposure to just about everything we think of in this sphere: true information architecture with the taxonomic analysis of the manuscript, cutting-edge interaction design and strategic experience planning; it had it all. That all this was done for a client in Penguin and a subject in Stephen Fry that were as enthusiastic and involved as we were made it doubly exciting. The icing on the cake? Stephen’s contact with Messrs. Jobs and Ive, experience and design royalty, ensuring that my work, our work, is on their radar.

I left Norwich Union (now Aviva) nearly three years ago to join Dare with the express reason of doing work like this, long may it continue.

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Note: As of writing, within 5 hours since it launched, the app is already No. 4 in the iPhone Top Grossing apps.

Credits: Everyone involved in this project is writing about it and being gloriously magnanimous and humble in their praise for the team:

• Flo Heiss (Creative Partner) on astral alignment and that fact that “everybody gave a shit“
• Alex Matthews (technical director) also calls it a “Perfect Storm“
• Stefanie Posavec is rightly proud of her wonderful work
• Stephen Fry himself tweets using my URL 🙂
• The suits, PMs and general whip crackers and lubricators Liza, Robin and Seth
• Not got an iPhone? View the demo video on YouTube

Official press stuff: Campaign wrote a simple summary and the Press Association have a piece too. As a long-time reader of Infosthetics it’s great that they have picked up on it too.