We understood that alot of the content that was being uploaded to our peer to peer cloud storage product was created on iOS devices. We decided to make it easier for our users to get their content to the cloud and the solution would be a native mobile application. We decided to build both iPhone and iPad solutions for our users in the form of a universal iOS app with a single code base.
I was the Lead UX Designer on the project. I worked with the product owners which included the PM, CTO and also the CEO. I worked with the mobile development team as well. We did some initial user interviews to establish our user scenarios and the user personas for the application. Once we had our set of scenarios established we did some early user tests with sketches we had done. We took the feedback from the sketches and started to develop our wireframes which also helped better inform the development team on what API’s needed to built for the app. Once we did another round of user testing with the wireframes we moved on to the visual design.
We had a couple big challenges when building this application. One big challenge was that we were building a universal app and we needed to build a responsive design that was compelling on both phone and tablet. We also had the challenge of being multi-device. Since we had applications for web, mobile and desktop, we needed to really have an understand of where the mobile apps fit in. Symform took advantage of all of the devices internal storage and we needed to be transparent on how the app was using the phone. We were also supporting a wide variety of media types and we needed to provide solutions for viewing them We built media viewers for photos, video and documents.
We had an opportunity to work with our existing users to establish our user scenarios for the mobile application. We utilized research techniques including card sorting, grouped card sorting, user interviews and surveys to help build out the information architecture of the application. Sketches and wireframes also helped the team build out the underlying architecture quickly.
