At the time Qualcomm came to us, they were developing a new Smartphone platform with all-new native applications. They wanted us to help them design, initially, four new native applications for their platform, as well as think through their current design paradigms & specifications.
As this was mostly a straight-up design project (Qualcomm had already done extensive user research), this project involved looking over their research, familiarizing ourselves with their target user, and then designing applications that made the most sense. During the middle of our design project, we decided we needed more user feedback so we did a quick and dirty usability test of particular functionality within our design.
After our research and design process, we wrote up extensive design documentation and specifications using the components that had already been designed for Qualcomm's other native applications, as well as creating our new custom components.
Over the course of 12 weeks, we developed user flows and detailed design specifications for all four applications. We also delivered a usability report detailing our findings.
Since Qualcomm was developing an entirely new mobile platform, we got a chance to research existing mobile platforms like iPhone and Android, and create new interaction paradigms that combined the best aspects of each platform. Qualcomm wanted “the fun of the iPhone with the practicality of the Android,” and we took this line seriously when creating our designs.
As mentioned above, a usability test was done in the middle of our design process to help us clarify a particular design direction.
We were unsure which deletion paradigm was the most intuitive for users - did they want to select items and then delete them, or did they want to decide to delete things and then select the items to delete? We had a hunch that the “select then act” pattern would be more intuitive, but we decided to test this out on potential users.
11 users participated in the study, and were asked to perform specific tasks using paper prototypes of the Alarm and ToDo applications over a half-hour time period. Users were then asked for qualitative and quantitative feedback.
We found out that users overall did prefer a “select then act” paradigm, although this wasn't quite as obvious when deleting multiple items. Overall, they wanted the process that required the least amount of “digging into menus” in order to delete.
Qualcomm’s design and development team had already created some particular design elements that they wanted us to use when designing the native applications. This meant that we had to keep these elements in mind during our design process, and then carefully document exactly which elements were used in our designs. The specification writing process involved calling out all elements used in each screen of our designs and detailing which components these elements used. In some cases, we created our own components to account for new design decisions.
