Evolving ideas

Here are four images, showing the evolution of Grab My Table. This first one was taken early on, when we decided that imagery would be fundamental to success. In these early, super-sketchy phases, I’m usually just working out what ingredients are fundamental, what are secondary, and what does the real content need; e.g. restaurants offer multiple menus, menus have multiple sections, sections have multiple items, items have a title, description, and a price.

When I’m convinced that I understand the domain well enough to design for it, I’ll explore different design directions. This is necessary to prevent anchoring, or thinking in patterns, during design. Here are a few different directions from late on in the design phase, when we had established the primary layout.

When I have explored enough directions and given each component its due dilligence, I move away from paper, post-its, and whiteboards, and into OmniGraffle, where change is more expensive, but the deliverable is more suitable for a client. For this app, I tried out the Konigi Sketch stencil, which worked out pretty well. I always use realistic data in wireframes, designing with lorum ipsum is a sure way to produce poor applications. Here is the first screen we sent over to the guys.

As you can see, Eoghan moved some things around during visual design, and that’s the way it’s meant to be. To paraphrase Nielsen, the only thing worse than having a graphic designer ignore your wireframe, is to have them implement it pixel perfect.