How Do I Love Thee, Nike Training Club App

Let me count the ways…

1. You’re confident and focused. You’re not worried about being everything to everybody. No. You know your narrow audience well and you cater directly to us. This app is for women! Current athletes, former athletes, wanna-be athletes — it doesn’t matter to you. As long as we are here to sweat, you’ll provide the guidance we need, at our level, for our specific goal. Thank you for not confusing our relationship with Twitter feeds, in-app messaging, friend requests, or a new fangled calendaring system. We’re here to do one thing. And that’s ok by you.
2. You speak to me. GET LEAN, you say? Yes. But let’s start slow, I’m a beginner. A modified burpee? I’m not even sure what a… Oh you have a video? And you’ll pause my timer for me while I watch and learn? That’s so thoughtful… 15 more seconds in plank? Ok. I can do that. For you.
3. Your beauty isn’t overworked. Oh, that UI. You minx. I love your clean lines and minimal color palette. That font. Nice choice. It’s bold without being aggressive. It’s tall and thin without being fragile. Just like my future self. I don’t mind that your tab bar is native, you spent your time enhancing more important features. 
4. You know exactly how to encourage me. The bonus workouts. The healthy recipes. The badges of honor. I’ll be a Rebel in another 97 minutes. And I. Can’t. Wait. Yes, go ahead and schedule that Friday morning workout for me. I’ll see you at 8.
5. You keep your promises. You, my love, are an app of substance. I couldn’t walk for two days after our first meeting. I was sore in all the right places. You provide the workouts you advertise and you never get in my way. You let me access my favorites right from the home screen, view all my previous workouts, and preview the ones I’m just not sure about yet. 

Thank you Nike Training Club App. 

Let’s (Just) Do It.

Hugs + Kisses,
Terumi
A Very Happy UX Lead 

________________________

User Interface: A
User Experience: A+

Form Follows Function: A Hard Lesson in App Design

Here at Citrrus, our Creative team is hard at work taking inventory of the latest apps to hit the streets so our clients can benefit from cutting edge techniques to make their app a smashing succcess. Like a moth to a flame, we can’t help but dissect, sneer, and swoon over other designer’s work and find ourselves pinning up UI and UX elements to our Pinterest boards at an alarming rate.  We chat a lot about good and bad examples that come across our desks and it would be selfish for us to keep that feedback to our whiteboards and wiki’s, so we’re officially kicking off #ThursdayThrowdown: where one app enters the ring and battles it out with the Citrrus creative team.

This month, we took on  Columbia’s GPS Pal. If first impressions are anything to go by, this app made us swoon. With hand crafted details like unique typography, beveled table dividers, and custom tab navigation carried all the way down to the very last pixel—not to mention the dreamy splash screen—this app had us at “launch”. Take a look and you’ll see why:

But then we started to use the app.  And that’s where our love-fest started to fizzle.

We discovered that it wasn’t very intuitive—the first few frantic taps left us hungry for a ‘get started’ guide and on tap #2 we reached an empty journal. The HELP section wasn’t very pleasing either. The texture was not as crisp as it is in the rest of the app, the fonts have weird bevels, and the FAQs are laid out in a boring table view that does not seem to have a logical order or keyword search capability. Since we are problem solvers, here’s a solution for the kind folks over at Columbia: try using stylized empty data screens or maybe tool tip hints to guide your users through their first few steps of creating content.  

In the Journal screen (assuming you had a few entries stacked in there), the placement of the detail disclosure icon ignores Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) of consistency and conditioned behavior in table usage. We rarely see tables where the detail disclosure button is not centered vertically in the cell and try to emplore this in most table apps we build for clients. 

Another nit picky thing that goes along with Apple’s HIG recommendations of consistency is that this app chose to use a custom styled action sheet for socially sharing entries instead of Apple’s standard action sheet overlay. Most apps use the standard action sheet for sharing functionality—so much so in fact that we’re willing to bet most users could share on their preferred platform with their eyes closed. Recommendation: don’t ignore familiar behaviors; it will only trip up your users.

Like a bad joke that needs explaining, we were still waiting to get the punchline. As we started to track activities and load up a few journal entries we hit a major snag: how do you delete journal entries?! [insert broken record sound here] Took us a while to figure it out, but supposedly the only way to do this is through their Web interface. Tsk tsk, Columbia. Don’t you know that users expect to have the power to easily create and remove data? If you take away their power and make it harder for them to complete basic tasks, they probably won’t revisit your app much again. 

All in all, we give this app a ‘Citrrus’ grade of:

User Interface: B+
User Experience: C-

Moral of the story: don’t put all your efforts into the lovely UI of an app at the expense of UX. 

NSLog() - Avoiding performance problems

Most developers make liberal use of the NSLog() function when developing and/or testing their code. You’d be crazy not to. Unfortunately we seldom remember to pick up after ourselves. And while you might think that it’s not a big deal, you’d be wrong. Leaving calls to NSLog() in your ‘Release’ code could significantly affect the performance of your iOS app.

Suppose that you’re developing an app with a UIScrollView or UITableView. And within the scrollview’s delegate you place an NSLog statement in the ‘scrollViewDidScroll’ method. This means that for every frame you have additional and unnecessary function calls which in turn consume CPU cycles.

Of course, no one likes cleaning up after themselves. So a quick and easy way to disable the NSLog calls in the ‘Release’ code is to define a wrapper macro for logging. What I do is define the following in my project’s .pch file

#ifdef DEBUG

#define DebugLog(…) NSLog(@“%s (%d) %@”, __PRETTY_FUNCTION__, __LINE__, [NSString stringWithFormat:__VA_ARGS__])

#else

#define DebugLog(…) 

#endif

BetterPress & Citrrus Featured in BRINK Magazine

BetterPress, Citrrus’ iPad publishing platform, was highlighted as a mover and shaker in the latest issue of BRINK magazine.

“this exciting group of entrepreneurs had brilliant insight and advice to share with our readers.” - BRINK magazine

The team at Citrrus would like to thank BRINK magazine for featuring our company in their latest issue.

Please read more about our company and our product in the latest issue!