Low-cost branding for packaging
When I started my little sketchbook business I was shipping all of the sketchbooks in USPS provided packaging. After some of the long distance deliveries began to experience damage, I switched to easy-fold kraft mailers made for shipping books. The mailers held up well and were fairly easy to assemble, pack, tape and label.
After shipping a few hundred, I realized that I was missing a really awesome branding opportunity.
I came across Simon Stamps. They make custom wood handle or self-inking rubber stamps. The process for creating a custom stamp is super easy. I just uploaded my logo, selected the appropriate size stamp and selected some ink. I was able to find a blue ink that was really close to the blue color in the App Sketchbook logo.
It took about an hour or so on a weekend to stamp my shipment of boxes from Uline.
How much? The custom stamp, ink pad and shipping was only about $36 total.
October 2010
iPhone Form Field Design Patterns
When designing iPhone apps, entry fields seem to be where I struggle the most. While I definitely agree that a mobile device is not the best place for data entry, there are cases where it's necessary to have a series of entry fields. So after you've spent time refining the form process and the number of entry fields in your iPhone app, what options do you have for layout and design?
Left-align, bold label and inputs
This pattern can be seen in Mail's Account Info view. Touching inside of the entry area activates the keyboard.Probably the most common form pattern used.
Left-align labels and hinted inputs
No label, hinted inputs with clear button
Right-align label with action button, active label
In Apple's Contacts app, you have the ability to add/remove fields and specifiy custom labels. This app implements a right-aligned label with an entry field, hint text and clear button combined with an add or remove button which is shown to the left of the field area. They also use a vertical rule between the label and entry field. The label can be tapped so you can edit the label.
Multiple fields, single-entry view
This is just a small sample of the many variations for iPhone entry forms. When starting to design forms for your own app be sure and take note of the number fields, context for each field and field variations.
October 2010
A "Flurry" of answers before updating your iPhone app
While working on the latest version of the MailChimp iPhone app, I decided to look into our Flurry analytics to get a baseline for where our users were in terms of devices and OS versions.
The results turned out to be very valuable.
They're still using 3.1.x
A good majority of our app users have not been upgraded their phone OS recently. There's a ton of reasons why you wouldn't upgrade, but if analytics from the web hold true for mobile, it's just not common for people to upgrade *anything* unless absolutely necessary or prompted by the OS. And don't count on OS upgrades, as some people will ignore those as well.
What about retina display?
A quick glance showed that the iPhone 4 is doing quite well in terms of model distribution across our active sessions. So, we took some time to update the interface and app icon.
If you're not in your mobile analytics everyday, at least take a few minutes before planning your next release to get a baseline.
October 2010
About Me
Stephen MartinWorking on mobile and web apps. Drinking too much coffee.
In August of 2009, I launched an iPhone (and iPad) sketchbook business.
The following year, @cricketgeek and I released Next Pint, the first social beer app to hit the app store.
Search
Tags
- iphone (5)
- ui (2)
- analytics (1)
- app (1)
- branding (1)
- business (1)
- cocoa camp (1)
- design (1)
- forms (1)
- forty four apps (1)
- View all 17 tags »
Contributors
Stephen Martin
