Finger Gesture Launcher Mobile App

Onboarding Teardown

With the proliferation of mobile apps of all kinds, it is not uncommon to see people’s mobile devices littered with a lot of apps. Most of the times it’s because they are just checking out new apps to see if they would be useful and other times they simply forgot or were too lazy to uninstall these apps.

Navigating to that one app the user really wants to pop open becomes a pain. This problem is compounded if you know…you are an adult and happen to have a propensity for order and organization and you categorize and put together similar apps into neat little folders. Then, the simple process of opening an app devolves into a search and rescue mission. After having done this a couple of times and getting annoyed every… single... time, I decided to look for solutions. And I found one.

Who did it?

Finger Gesture Launcher is a neat little app created by Carlos Morera de la Chica, a 24 year old computer engineer from Jaén, Spain as part of his final college project. This mobile app promised to alleviate my pain of having to search through a bunch of app folders just to get to the one app I really needed. Also, it presented to me a unique opportunity to play the devil’s advocate and critique the onboarding and the app functionality. So here goes..

The actual app teardown

When you open the app, there is no splash screen. You end up straight into the app and onto the onboarding slideshow. Some may argue it’s efficient that way while others may say, it’s an opportunity lost for branding. I firmly fall under the second camp and love to see a simple splash screen with maybe the logo of the app. Makes it look more professional. Anyways, on to the slideshow. The 7 slides seem a little ad-hoc and unstructured. The first one shows the core user benefit; the raison d’être, while the rest seem to flit between how to create gestures and access the various parts of the app. The last slide has a video which seemed to link to an online source, which didn’t load. Images work better in such cases simply because there is never a possibility of an image not loading due to lack of internet.

The focus of this slideshow, instead, should have been to explain how to create and use a gesture to launch apps on the users device. So the screens could have been the following:

1. How to create gestures
2. What type of actions can one launch
3. How to actually launch an action one a gesture has been created
4. And finally, the core benefit

Boom! 4 slides …short, sweet and done.

Clicking on Get Started takes you to the main page in the app. This is where you can create your gestures which will in turn trigger actions. Instead of displaying Tutorial and Get Started in the top nav bar, the Tutorial text could have been removed and instead of the Get Started text, a call to action button at the end of the slideshow would have been more consistent and smooth. The least that can be done is to change the generic Get Started caption to something more in line with what the app does viz. Create Gestures.

You notice once thing immediately: the green create button is at the top left. It seems a little ironical that a user may find it difficult to reach a button in the app using their thumbs in an app named Finger Gesture Launcher. Duh.. Why is it there?

The big green button which initiates a core action of adding an action has to be on the bottom right, where the right thumb can reach it easily.

Most Android apps with material design language tend to have the core action button on the bottom right. No reason why this shouldn’t have been followed.

Clicking on the big green button starts ….another slide show???

This slideshow explains how to actually create a gesture and the corresponding action. So this help comes at the time of actual use. That’s good.

I’m nitpicking here but I think instead of another slideshow a simple guide tour through the use of tooltips would have been better. We go through the slides one by one and then click on Get Started again.?? Instead of having the generic Get Started caption, it could have been Create a Gesture in its place.

So you click on Get Started and that displays the Choose your gesture action screen. You select what you want your gesture to result in; like opening an app, opening a website, etc. I select Open Application and it pops up a list of apps on my mobile device. I select Shazam and that shows up in the second screen above. Then over the course of next three screens the user is supposed to draw their gesture repeatedly. I do that and clicking on DONE brings me back to the main page. But this time, the gesture I created is also there.

Now it’s time to put this into action. Just tap on the floating bubble there and it creates a drawing canvas across your screen.

Just draw the gesture that you defined and voilà, Shazam opens. This works really well!!

The gestures only need to roughly match what you defined and you should be alright.

If the floating bubble seems distracting, then a long tap will make it disappear. To get the floating bubble back, simply pull down the options drawer from the top of the screen and then click on the app options displayed.

To change the settings, slide the menu from the left and click on Settings. This brings up the settings menu.

You may think that there are only two sub-menu items viz. are Finger Drawer Settings and General Settings. And you would be wrong. There are actually more than those two sub-menu items but it seems as if they are the only ones. There is no indication that it is actually a sliding menu which displays other options when a user slides on the menu. Having another menu slide out would have been a better option. That way atleast all the options are visible straight up front.

Overall the app does what it promises and does that part really well. Some usability and UI issues need sorting out.

But if you face the problem of multiple apps residing in your phone and you need to quickly navigate to one, just define a gesture and open the app quickly using this app.