HTC Hero Icon PSD (You know you like it)

Those of you who know me know that I don’t nor­mally do this sort of thing but I am in a giv­ing mood. So, in that spirit I sub­mit to you an HTC Hero Icon and source PSD to accom­pany. It pro­vides ideas for those cut­ting their teeth on icon design in pho­to­shop, and sneaks in a lit­tle visual candy for the Hero lovers in the crowd.

PS. “HTC”, “HTC Hero” are © HTC Cor­po­ra­tion and I am in no way affil­i­ated with them. This is intended for per­sonal use only.

Click the image below to down­load and enjoy!

The Value of Function or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Customer’s Ratings

I recently had a project, ACLS Advisor, get approved for the App store. After a few days it shot up to 11th place in the med­ical cat­e­gory, and has since dipped as low as 16th but has main­tained its spot with the major­ity of it’s reviews being 5 stars. What makes this project spe­cial is it’s scope and tar­get audi­ence. For the unini­ti­ated this app is meant as a ref­er­ence guide for assess­ing a patient, find­ing drug dosages, study­ing heart rhythms, and many other things in a deci­sion tree pat­tern. Def­i­nitely a ref­er­ence app and not much on enter­tain­ment right? Well, when I was approached to do this app it was indi­cated to me that the client would like this app to set itself apart on the land­scape by pro­vid­ing an engag­ing user expe­ri­ence by sim­u­lat­ing a futur­is­tic med­ical device. What did this request mean for the app? What is now dri­ving this app’s sales, and what can we do to improve?

With this in mind we made sev­eral deci­sions up front:

• In the med­ical world there are many glar­ing screens and beeps and flashes, we should have a high con­trast­ing but dark UI to pre­vent an ocu­lar assault. IE: We do not want the user cring­ing when open­ing the app.
• We have a huge amount of infor­ma­tion to dis­play but we do not want it to be illeg­i­ble. Find a font size that negates the need to scroll too much but dis­plays the infor­ma­tion clearly.
• On the off chance that this app needs to be used in a life sav­ing sit­u­a­tion (!) the deci­sion tree needs to be nav­i­gated rapidly and accu­rately. There needed to be larger but­tons that high­light to show the selec­tion, and an easy to find back but­ton to step back in the deci­sion tree.
• We need to look futur­is­tic. What does this mean? Well I trans­lated this to mean new, and fresh. Peo­ple love new and fresh things, and covet them dearly. Recently these things have been phones, cam­eras, game devices. They are usu­ally slick, hav­ing round edges, glossy, hav­ing some matte fin­ish maybe? The iPhone has these things but I usu­ally find that peo­ple get engrossed in the soft­ware and for­get about the sur­round­ing phone so they need sub­tle cues in tex­ture and color on the UI itself to get this across.

How did these deci­sions play out? We cur­rently have sev­eral 5-star reviews and a cou­ple 3-star reviews. Here is what I have learned from them.

• The 5-star reviews all address how accu­rate and con­ve­nient the infor­ma­tion is to have on hand, and how well the deci­sion tree works. I would say that the func­tion has won these cus­tomers. None of them men­tion the UI which I see as a suc­cess. These med­ical pro­fes­sion­als wanted their infor­ma­tion, they were able to access it with ease and will be doing so again and again. The UI never impeded them. They are sat­is­fied enough to give the app Apple’s high­est cus­tomer awarded accolade.
• The 3-star reviews all address UI con­cerns, or wishes for the future upgrades. One refers to dif­fi­culty read­ing while bounc­ing around in the back of an ambu­lance, which I can imag­ine would be quite dif­fi­cult. But both plainly state that larger fonts and a land­scape mode would make them happy. Both rea­son­able requests, and I think this is the ticket to more sales.

This app clearly has it’s core func­tion­al­ity down in spades and clearly is it’s rea­son for shin­ing. I think we have suc­cess­fully sat­is­fied the masses. What is next I sub­mit, is that we look at these 3-star reviews (which are good mind you, but can be turned into 5-stars) and tackle a strat­egy for mak­ing the EMT in a the back of the bounc­ing ambu­lance happy. The func­tion is what sold the app, form is what will have them sell­ing the app to their other EMT friends.

Hope­fully you will find this infor­ma­tion use­ful in your next app endeavor.

New Setup

Moved to Word­Press. It’s good to be back. Also made a silly light­weight html5 theme. The entire thing weighs in at around 50k, and most of that is due to images and white­space. We will see how it goes.