Designing a Sketching App for iPad Pro, pt 3

[This is part 3 in a series. You can read part 1 here.]

The creative process is notoriously mysterious. But working designers know it’s more science than art. It doesn’t work to go up a mountain and hope for a muse to visit you, you just have to do the work. Trust the process, as they say.

But sometimes the process takes you in interesting directions, and that can make it feel wild and unpredictable. For example, I thought I was going to think about document management next, but that’s not what happened. Instead, I took a screenshot of Apple’s build-in Notes.app and it got me thinking more about my proposed canvas design.

This isn’t the standard view, it’s actually two steps away. If you go into full screen mode (step one) and then swipe the tool palette out of the way (step two) you’re shown this. And it’s actually pretty close to what I want a sketching app to be. If this screen had undo/redo I’d probably be happy.

But it doesn’t. And so I play a sad trumpet and design my own app instead.

So I took this design and threw together some simple icons. I would like to stress that I am not happy with them from a visual standpoint. But that’s ok for now, because I’m just trying to understand the UX and the overall feel.

So here’s what I mocked up first:

Undo and redo are split out from the buttons for the tools palette and document management. Also I made undo/redo bigger but immediately thought it looked wrong. Also, having the UI split into two sections, an idea I liked yesterday, just didn’t feel like a good idea today.

I tried another mock where I tucked everything together and made the canvas #FFF white rather than the off-white in Notes.app. I also dimmed the redo button for its default state. It felt better.

Then I stared at the palette for a while. It feels kind of … heavy, doesn’t it? So I spent some time thinking about the value of each button, for the tenth (and not the last) time. I definitely need undo, which is the whole problem I have with Notes.app’s full screen mode. And if there’s undo, you need redo. So those are in.

Next is document management. I could remove that button by using a pinch gesture the way FiftyThree does with Paper. But I’ve watched so many people struggle with mis-pinches in Paper (two 3 year-olds, an 8 year old, and multiple adults), not to mention the discoverability problem of hiding core functionality behind a gesture. So I don’t want to do that. And the tool palette? I’m not sold on it. Let’s put that on hold for now.

So the big question is this: should the UI be there at all times, or come and go when you tap? I’ve explored this question across countless features, and while I use “shy chrome” sometimes, I’m keenly aware of its drawbacks. And if I have a principle of this app being as fast as possible, which I stated in day one, that means UI should be there at all times. Otherwise you get in that finicky situation where you want to undo but you have to tap or swipe randomly on a blank canvas to get to the feature you want. I don’t want finicky. I want as fast as possible and muscle-memorized, even if that means there’s always UI on the screen.

Will the UI ever get in the way? Yeah, but I’ll make it movable. Maybe you can place it in the four corners, the way Facetime’s self-camera works. Or maybe I’ll also allow it in the middles, for a total of eight snap points. It was around this time that I realized top right would get in the way of normal note-taking. So I tried the bottom left instead.

And that felt good enough to send to my friend William, who had a few minutes to spare before going back to his video game:

Then I got in this Twitter conversation with Curt Clifton, engineer at esteemed iOS/Mac house The Omni Group, who had some important insights to share:

In my original brainstorming, I had played around with the idea that Pencil and finger would trigger different results (Pencil = drawing, finger = UI) and it was still in the back of my mind as a possibility. But Curt’s feedback was a good reminder that an approach like that might be a bit too clever, and perhaps not even accepted in the store.

So: permanent UI is feeling more and more important, and at least 3 of the 4 buttons are feeling like requirements. Next up: document management! Unless I get on some other topic, as we saw happen today :)

[edit: here’s part four]