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Sephora for iPad review

Posted by chezza on July 27

Before I moved to Seattle, no trip to the US was complete without at least one visit to the Sephora store. That place is like Disneyland, and my friends and I have spent countless hours (and paychecks) happily picking up all manner of make-up related goods.

So I was really excited to get an EDM from Sephora yesterday announcing their free iPad app. The iPad seems to be the perfect medium for Sephora, encouraging casual browsing, one-click purchasing and being an amazing mobile-specific replica of their in-store experience.

So my first impressions of their iPad app were of disappointment. Hitting the “shop now” link on an iPad 1 takes you to a Safari window which opens the Sephora.com website. On an iPad 2 it opens a webkit view of the site within the app. The app really doesn’t seem to be setup to encourage shopping for products, they’re heavily reliant on the website.

The Social section aggregates content from Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and the BeautyTalk section of the Sephora website, but only gives a glimpse. Hitting the “join the conversation” button again opens the Sephora website in a Safari window and takes you out of the app. This feels really clunky and disjointed and is a jarring experience when it’s not expected – to get back the user will need to close Safari and find the Sephora app again.

The Virtual Mirror (on iPad 2 only) has been getting a lot of press attention. It utilizes the iPad camera to show you a view of your own face next to makeup tutorial videos from YouTube. The theory is you can follow along with the tutorial by applying makeup using the camera as a mirror. The theory is sound but the implementation didn’t really work for me. Firstly, the iPad needs to be in portrait mode to run the virtual mirror – tilting the iPad slightly will end the tutorial and send the user back to the virtual mirror landing screen. Therefore it’s quite awkward to position the iPad in a way that has the camera angled correctly as well as allowing hands free for putting on makeup – it really is easier to just use a real life mirror rather than this virtual mirror feature.

The Beauty Report is where the majority of the content for the app lives, and clocks in at a whopping 32MB. This is where beauty tips, new products, great photography, videos and other content is exposed in a magazine style format. Any purchasing is redirected to the website away from the app. This is where I can see users doing the majority of their sit-back browsing of the app. For any users into more of a magazine-type experience, this is a nicely augmented way of exposing new content and products, as well as tutorial videos.

The biggest issues I had with the app was how slow it is. Each screen takes a few seconds to load, and even some of the gestures (swiping, tapping) have a little bit of a lag, which does not encourage serendipitous browsing. I stopped swiping through the social and Beauty Report sections as it took too long for each screen to load. The virtual mirror took so long to load that I was staring at my own face for a good three minutes waiting for the logo to change into a video – not the most pleasant experience.

All in all, unfortunately I have to give the Sephora app a thumbs down. I wanted so much to love this app, and I’m practically begging Sephora to let me spend my paycheck on beauty products I don’t need, but they’re just not rising to the bait with this app. They have a lot of rough edges they’ll need to polish down before it becomes a must-have app.

China's knock-off Apple stores

Posted by chezza on July 20

One of my favourite past-times in South East Asia is checking out all the knock-off counterfeit gear that is sold brazenly without any regard for intellectual property. Within months of the iPod being released you could buy fake iPods in Thailand – they looked real, but they were poorly made and were running Thai software. The scroll wheel didn’t really scroll either.

In China they have gone one step further than counterfeit iPhones and have entire counterfeit stores popping up. That’s right, there are fake Apple Stores selling fake Apple computers and fake Apple software. They even have real employees wearing fake blue Apple t-shirts with fake Apple ID badges.

A beautiful ripoff – a brilliant one – the best ripoff store we had ever seen (and we see them every day). But some things were just not right: the stairs were poorly made. The walls hadn’t been painted properly. Apple never writes “Apple Store” on it’s signs – it just puts up the glowing, iconic fruit. The name tags around the necks of the friendly salespeople didn’t actually have names on them – just an Apple logo and the anonymous designation “Staff”.

Birdabroad has just blogged about a couple of these fake stores that have popped up in her neighborhood in Kunming in China. There are some great photos on her blog, and from the comments it appears that the mainstream news (BBC and Financial Times) are looking to write stories on this. Knowing China they’re going to stay one step ahead of the authorities – I’m sure if there’s a raid they’ll pack up within minutes and move half a block down the road and setup again.

Apple counterfeit

American Review for iPad

Posted by chezza on July 18

It’s a big week for app launches – our new iPad magazine app has also just gone live in the iTunes App Store. American Review for iPad is a quarterly magazine on American foreign policy, global perspectives and independent and intelligent analysis of American politics and foreign affairs.

American Review approached us to create their iPad magazine publishing framework, which we did as a hybrid HTML5 / native iOS application. We went with a minimalist, clean and simple design as the content is so rich we wanted users to engage without being distracted by design or interaction.

Developing with HTML5 came with its own challenges, which Brian will talk more about – I’ve never seen so much math involved in CSS, he ended up with huge spreadsheets of calculations of widths and heights and formulas.

We’re so happy to see this app go live, not least because we had a “stop the presses” moment with the death of Bin Laden announced fairly close to launch. Something impossible to predict in an initial project plan, but I guess it’s par for the course when dealing with current affairs publishing.

So check out American Review for iPad and let us know what you think – and stay tuned for the next edition coming soon.

ios hybrid app html5 american review magazine publishing iPad magazine

pinchzoom and ADP release mobile payroll apps

Posted by chezza on July 18

We’re very excited to announce that ADP Mobile Solution for iPhone and mobile web has launched today. ADP approached us to create the mobile strategy, user experience and visual design, as well as building out the HTML5 mobile app. The ADP Mobile Solutions apps allow users to manage their payroll and employment information.

Some of the features are:

• See your payroll info: employees can view pay statements from up to five previous pay periods, toggling between Net Pay and Gross Pay year-to-date screens.
• Check on your 401K and retirement savings: employees can view information on their accounts, such as current allocations, distribution percentages, account balances and rate of return.
• Clock in with Time & Attendance: employees can clock in, clock out, indicate if they are running late to work or if they anticipate being absent for illness, and create timesheets directly from their mobile devices. The user’s location can be validated to ensure that an employee can only clock in from particular locations.
• Access the corporate Intranet: The corporate directory provides the ability to view, search, and contact employees listed in the directory. Links to phone, location and email fields are active and will call/email your contact or bring you to a map, as you would expect in a phone app. The company news feature allows employees to read news and events from their smartphone using RSS feeds.

These apps had some fantastic design challenges, particularly around simplifying really complex (and stressful) financial information into an easy to use, straightforward mobile application. We wanted to ensure we didn’t overload the user with unnecessary details yet still allow full functionality into managing their employee records.

One of the more interesting challenges was in reconciling the designs and the data. ADP is one of the largest providers of business outsourcing solutions, and have an infinite number of user configurations with millions of active users. There is no such thing as a “typical” user, which meant the design not only had to be simple and easy to use, but it had to take into account dozens or even hundreds of use cases. We wanted to ensure we retained pixel perfect design, yet also allowed for an infinite number of user configurations of each screen.

Creating these apps was a huge and rewarding challenge for the pinchzoom team, and it’s awesome to see them finally go live. We’re looking forward to all the user feedback.

pinchzoom ios iphone app payroll ADP html5