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!

Follow us along on a journey, a journey of web page development.

When DDH first started in 1997, I was designing the web site using animated gifs galore and Netscape’s Composer to design the web site.  I remember when the HanDBase gallery was a single page of listings and submission involved emailing me the files directly so I could edit the ever growing listing manually.  My how things have changed!

Through the years we get asked a lot of questions about the products we sell.  And each time we get asked a question a bunch of times, we often would add it to the site, either directly to a product page, or placed with the knowledgebase.  The desire to have everything available ’self-service’ to customers is both benevolent and selfish by nature;  benevolent, because we want users to be able to enjoy using the product and not having to contact us with questions we have already been asked, and selfish because- well, the same reason applies!

In the quest for completeness, we have developed web pages that are pretty long- not a page on our site can be visited without making judicious use of the scroll bar even on a 1920×1200 monitor.  And in that sense, we’ve created a monster.

A new user who visits the site could potentially find the answers to all of their questions, but because of TMI, too much information, they see a large page with way too much text, and skip it entirely.  The end result is that they either move on completely or still wind up having to contact us to find their questions answered.  This TMI thus works backwards to its intended goal.

So now we’ve been going back and redoing a few pages at a time, using less text, providing less answers per page, and hopefully raising the chances someone will actually read the text on there.  Hopefully we don’t ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ and lose the valuable answers, which we’re moving into their own FAQ or Knowledgebase (KB) articles.   So far, the iPhone main page, the Mac Desktop, and the Mac iPhone related pages were updated- take a look:

iPhone HanDBase Page

HanDBase Plus for iPhone Mac OS

HanDBase for Mac

and we hope to use more of the same on other pages as we update them.  That is, less text, more readability and making use of embedded video tours and such to show the way.

Please let us know how we’re doing in that regard- we want to create a site that is readable, friendly but still informative!