Move Fast and Shape Things

What if using design and development tools followed after a different aesthetic and ethos

There seems to be no end to the frustration which comes when designing some aspect of a product on the iPad Pro. From dropped application support to inaccessible websites (looking at you InVision), there seems to be more hoops to jump through to do what shouldn’t even be an issue. I believe it should be almost instinctive to create an app, site, or product with the ease of drawing as if on pen and paper. In a very real-to-me analogy, designing with a tablet and stylus should invoke actions not dissimilar to Mickey when he played with the Wizard’s hat in Fantasia. There’s nothing about the current state of software which should make this hard or impossible, but here things are.

I’ ve seem to come back often to technologies acting like this scene — immaturity and ability

Eight years after the introduction of the iPad, anyone who frames it as a replacement for a laptop has to live with a certain and special admission: there is no such thing as software designed on an iPad that’s made for an iPad. And therefore, productivity is gained thru the interpretative dance of software magicians whom are outside of the tablet’s canvas. Applications are made on a macOS laptop (or website tweaked ever-so-nicely using any other platform) and then delivered to the iOS AppStore as version fit for iPads. A developer without such a sense of focus just doesn’t see the difference in why this matters — and maybe they should not, it is just code-to-screen, right? But, with this admission, designers, developers, software testers, analysts, and pretty much anyone doing the “pipes and bolts” behaviors of creating sense out of work and its artifacts craft a new and differnet workflow if they choose to use an iPad as a productivity machine. This is not so different from eight years ago — even if you might be using a tablet-friendly iteration of various apps and services.

I have dreams and sketches of doing something about that. But, where my skills to develop might be a touch out of pace, there is a perspective I can bring to the table in the form of moving fast and shaping things. This is my ideation state and has worked quite well at various stops in order to convey some sense of the depth or emptiness of various product requirements. Could solving such a frustration towards product development on the iPad could follow a similar perspective?

Inital sketch for Neighborhood Cuisine using Paper by 53 for iOS

My thinking starts with a few (negotiable but not entirely so) perspectives:

• An iOS-based product design tool has to deftly move between “show me” and “why does it do that” modes
• Drawing (including sketching, annotating, and connecting by lines) is more important than typing
• Interaction should be simplified to select-point-act — and then export to a developer’s code format of choice if needed
• Comments — whether from stakeholders, analysts, testers, or anyone else before the product is live — need to be able to be made on-screen, not just in a messaging interface
• Sharing assets shuold ask about conventions — versioning is the default; automatic/scheduled saving/pushing/committing; review-before-updating
• Minimal chrome for features (re:buttons); instead leverage iOS touch, multitouch, and Pencil’s pressure sensitivity abilities to show tools and configurations as needed
• Localized machine learning should be utilzied to sharpen, shape, describe, and even animate what’s drawn based on learning the designer/artist’s intentions — using SiriKit to learn the designer just as it learns to context/content
• A rules engine which evaluates the design as its being shaped and asks the “what is this supposed to do” kind of question — its both validation and recommendation

Essentially, an application to jump into it as if about to sketch some ideas, but along the way, the fidelity of what’s being sketched can be tuned up a notch and made into usable assets for some other aspect of the product design journey.

Wireframes for Neighborhood Cuisine created w/Adobe Comp CC for iOS

After that, it would be great to just say, “go make beautiful stuff.” But, it doesn’t really work that easily. The time and craftsmanship which goes into a great product design is hard to quantify. However, getting from what’s in the head of a designer to something which communicates the goals of a product takes a good bit of effort. Its in this gap where the opportunity to move a touch faster might invite something that’s better shaped in the perspective that is design.

Faster isn’t in the production of the initial product as much as it is taking that initial thought and putting in a communicative space quickly. Faster is taking some of the inherent qualities of direct input interfaces on an iPad (touch/multi-touch, gestures, Pencil) and making them work not according to the way we are accustomed to doing things, but the ways in which the tools enable us to do them.

I think we can do better in shaping. I feel like we should be. What we aren’t doing is using the canvas and tools as we could becuase authoring is the avenue to which “Apple’s vision for personal computing” has yet to travel. Yes, there’s certainly some productivity able to happen at the intersection of Technology and Liberal Arts, but more productivity can and should happen if the map gets extended and the bicycle is allowed a place to traverse. The iPad and iOS doesn’t need XCode, it needs a vision for using its inate qualities and direct input mechanisms to craft what’s best usable in this frame. This is what happened with talkies, and online news has continued such shifting. If this response were to find itself in the hands of those who have already roughly created better realities on their iPads, we might indeed move faster and shape better things. At least, that’s the impossible I hope to see overcome.

Screens shown are from an app idea that came out of another project; there might be something else to shape beyond these.