Pay No Attention To That Man Behind The Curtain

In our new HanDBase forums, we were discussing that we have received some comments from customers that say they love how functional HanDBase is compared to the competition, but wish it were as snazzy as some of the slick iPhone apps out there. I agree! Here’s what I wrote in that article:

At any rate, I am not too proud a person to take advice and input on this. I would much rather have a lot of happy customers that love the design than a bunch of people who say it’s ugly but has a great personality So if anyone has any sort of design background and has any thoughts on how to make HanDBase look a little more snazzy, please let me know. In fact, I think I’m going to start a separate thread based on this!

In that spirit, I’d love to get some input from you on possible ways to make HanDBase slicker looking. Here are the things I’ve been contemplating and I’d love for your input on these as well as some thoughts on other possible changes:

1 – New icon. Our original icon for HanDBase looked like this:

When HanDBase v3 came out we were at our prime, when Palm was at it’s peak and we were one of the top selling products for it, we paid a designer to come up with something slicker for HanDBase’s icon. Here’s what he did:

While I don’t recall having any complaints on the look of this, the overall idea of the thumbs up became a problem for some countries that were using HanDBase. It turns out that the thumbs up was offensive in some countries:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/In_what_countries_is_it_offensive_to_make_the_thumbs-up_sign

We heard from relatively few of them, as since the program doesn’t really support arabic, it’s not really of much use in those countries. But in our effort to try to make something more universally unoffensive, I commissioned Brian Houghton, our email technical support guru who happens to be an artist and art teacher by day to make something to what I felt was more descriptive of HanDBase – that is a handheld size container for all your data. The icon he came up with passed the muster in my eyes, but I think when we shrunk it down to icon size, it lost much of it’s sheen and recognizability.

I hear often of complaints about the icon but really could use some input on ideas for an icon that will work well at low resolutions (Palm OS icons are only 31×21 and this same icon needs to scale up to 128×128 and even higher, so whatever it is has to be easily modifiable to work in hi-rez and low rez both. The standard icon design for a database is an ugly cylinder which I feel is a step back to the 80’s, so hopefully something else more exciting and yet still obvious!

2- New color scheme: When I first designed HanDBase, there was no app store yet, just the promise of one coming soon. The only apps we all knew and loved were the built in apps and they all had a similar business like grey with pin stripes. This is the look and feel I tried to emulate when designing the program, but I did experiment with a scheme with more black which I liked. It definitely looked more slick to me but I didn’t want to stick out like a sore thumb from the built in apps! In reality, almost every app that has come out uses different color schemes and it’s even invited by Apple, so I guess in retrospect this was a bad call on my part! I’m planning on implementing this again, but having an option to go back to the current scheme for those who prefer it the way it is.

3- Does anyone have any other ideas for ways the interface could be snazzier? I’m wide open to ideas at this point, but please don’t be offended if we don’t wind up using your idea. I don’t have a budget to spend on a designer right now- it’s tough economic times for us all, but if we can try to do the best with whatever we have, we may be able to something nice here!

Thanks in advance for all your input on this!

Most of us have heard it said that the anonymity of the internet affords people more freedom to- let’s put it nicely- be who they are.  The Web 2.0 world of user comments and reviews has proven nothing if not that  That said, I think most of us who have experienced a set of Digg comments or read a review on the iPhone App Store would argue it’s a good thing that people don’t feel free enough to be ‘who they are’ in the real world.  If they did, it would be a pretty depressing place to live.

On occasion I wonder what it would like to be writing games or entertainment related apps instead of business and productivity focused ones like I have focused on for over 12 years now.  Certainly at first glance it seems like it would be more fun.  I know my kids would love it if they could show off a creation of mine to their friends, and it seems like game developers are the rock stars of the geek world.  But all it takes is a read of the comments on any game forum, YouTube video, or App Store game review to remind myself that some of the meanest comments are posted regularly in those.

I’ve been grateful that I don’t have to experience them as much in the business world.  And the few times I have, it has always been in a very inconsequential location.

The Apple iTunes App Store however is unique in that because of the design of it, and the limitations imposed, for the first time, the user community has the un-merciless power to control my ability to make a living.  Normally, user reviews are an after-thought to both potential buyers and existing customers alike.  Not so, in the iPhone App Store- they are very prominent.  Why is that?  Probably because demo versions of software are not permitted.  Customers have to decide to purchase without trying for themselves.  Refunds are also not an option.  Because of this, the user review takes it’s place as the most valuable form of non-biased information on a product there is.  And users and developers alike are having to suffer the consequences of this.

Because reviews are in a sense anonymous, there is no mechanism of responding to a review.  In the past, when someone posted a review on a reseller’s site (eg, Handango) and they said something like this, “This program sucks because the Access Control password does not actually encrypt the data in the database.”, I had the ability to respond to the reviewer via email and explain that ‘There is a separate encryption feature you can easily enable right below the Access Control feature, which was designed for a different purpose’.  Not only that, but if I could prove to Handango that the review was in error, I could have it removed completely.  Not so, in the App Store.  A user could write that our app sucks because of the above reason and I’d have no way to respond to them or the potential customer who reads that review and uses it to make a decision to pass on our product.  Sure, technically I could ‘game the system’ and post a positive review and respond to it, but that’s just wrong and not something I find as an option if I’d want to be able to sleep at night.

In my case, a recent update was done based on user feedback- many users did not like the field name on the left and field value on the right layout.  I personally agreed with the suggestion that centering the text above the field value was better because it meant no more word wrapped field names, and a better overall UI aesthetic.  I could have left things the way they were, but wanting to develop an app that pleases everyone, I redid the entire layout of the screen to accommodate this.  Apparently not all users were in agreement on this change, and while some users were kind enough to simply email us and ask for an option/preference to control this behavior (something I’m working on this week in fact), others simply handled it by posting a 1 star review on the App Store with the subject T E R R I B L E, or something to that effect (with their description saying the app took a step backwards because of this one change).  But customers don’t often read that
far- seeing a 1 star review with a description horrible is enough for most customers to pass on it.

Perhaps the original reviewer meant for that to happen in an effort to motivate us to make the change.  Nothing motivates people to do something like the lack of a paycheck right?  But I’d like to believe that people are not malicious by default.  And I’m guessing the average person does that without any regard for the actual consequence.  They just wanted their opinion and/or frustration to be heard, and because it was anonymous, there was no need to consider how it sounds or the effects it would have.  Or perhaps they have considered the effects, but don’t have the knowledge first hand, that I have of what a bad review does to a company.

So why choose this for a first post to a blog instead of the usual ‘we have exciting plans for this blog’ first post you always see?  Is my motivation of this post a plea for people to post more good reviews?  Or perhaps only good reviews?  Or am I just hoping to find the therepeutic qualities of a public venting?  The truth is that I thought my first post would be the best possible one to remind something to all, including myself.  A reminder that words have more power than most of us ever know.  The words we choose can either build up or tear down.  So… choose wisely!