Cameron Daigle is a graphic designer with a background in the world of coding. He is the web designer at Griffin Technology, but enjoys finding time for other projects as well. He particularly enjoys clarity, sharp colors, and clean CSS. He is currently nurturing an affinity for user interfaces.
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iTalk 2.0
The original iTalk was a smashing success, to say the least. We’re at somewhere around 1.5 million downloads at this point, and (most of the time) iTalk is the top-ranked recording app in the App Store. The question, then became how to improve it. And, of course, as with any piece of software, there are always things to improve.
Updated iTalk icons (L-R): iTalk Lite, iTalk Premium, iTalk SyncIn terms of interface, there were many little niggling issues I had with the initial iTalk release: the labels didn’t look quite right. The behavior of the button turning green when recording seemed awkward in hindsight. The button itself floated on flat black. I tackled these and other problems with the redesign.
Every pixel counts: old and new iTalk designs (L-R)
You can check out the iTalk website — and download the app — at iTalk Sync dot com.
Related
iTalk 1.0
Recording app for iPhone
iTalkSync.com
Website for iTalk app
griffintechnology.com (2008)
Website for Griffin Technology
The button now pulsates red instead of just snapping to a green color when recording. All of the labels are spot-on. The buttons are more carefully designed and consistent. And the background is now more unified, presenting the user with a UI that’s just as clean as the original, but much more unified in presentation.
iTalk’s website also needed an update to correspond with the new look. After launching and seeing how people used the 1.0 website (and also observing other apps’ sites), I learned a few key lessons:
- If you have subpages, people will link to the ‘download’ page. Google ranked /download higher than the homepage, so visitors were missing all of the site’s basic messaging. The new site is just one page.
- The App Store is powered by people, opinions, and word-of-mouth. I didn’t plan for including app store & media/blogger feedback in the original design; that is rectified as well.
- People want to feel the phone on the app. I considered embedding a Quicktime movie on the phone (something some app websites do quite well), but iTalk has minimal animation and very little complexity — so, giving the user a feature list and allowing them to flip through screenshots at their own pace seemed more appropriate for this particular app.
Here are some more screenshots showing the new app in various states. We also added transport controls to the premium version’s recording listing screen, and I tweaked margins, pixels, and buttons here and there to add a layer of polish.
