Alex Komarov Inc.

24
Nov

10
Aug

23
Jul

29
Jun

Foobi Iphone App Design Review

Remy from tapplox.com

Alex,

Your articles on iPhone Design so far have been very influential to me.

I am the lead designer and developer for Foobi, from tapplox.

Foobi was designed to track diet in a different way; instead of tracking by calories and tapping on many drilled down lists, it works by simply tracking servings per food group, and providing an overview of your food intake balance. Although I have tried really hard to not over design it by tracing Apple's footsteps while building custom UI control elements, I would love to hear from you about this subject.

Your app is very gorgeous indeed. And it is also usable and easy, exactly as you describing it: if user knows how to flick, he is already an expert. An expert in what though?

As stated in the iTunes description, the purpose of this app is " tracking and balancing your diet". I see the two main user goals as follows:

To record what food they consume
To make sure they stay on the right path with their nutrition, and to have clear guide for balancing their diet if they veer off that path.

Your app does a good job fulfilling the first goal: users can easily record what they eat just by selecting the right food group and adding the amount of "servings" consumed.

foobi

But what about the second, most important, end-goal of tracking progress and adjusting one’s diet? Does the app help customers achieve this goal? Not very well. There is big room for improvement.

Two main problems with that part of the app:

1) The summary information is hidden

To access the summary chart, you have to flip your iPhone to the side and view it in landscape mode. But this feature is not communicated through the app's design, so a user will only find it if they discover it by accident. When we're talking about fulfilling one of the major user goals, it is important to never rely on accidents to communicate functionality.

2) The summary information not very well designed, from an info design standpoint. Additionally,

the summary is not comprehensive enough.

The summary chart doesn't offer too much for the viewer.

Here are the main problems:

- It's not clear what the different colors mean, and there is no legend to help.

- The scale is not flexible. You can only view the information by week, which does not allow users to easily understand their "big picture" eating habits. (Tip: Consider incorporating the pinch gesture, to allow users to scale in and out.)

- You can't track the consumption of a specific food group with this chart, something that would be very valuable to users.

Information design is a vast topic. There are a million ways to address the problems I've highlighted and to increase the density of useful information for your audience. I recommend reading Edward Turfte's books, particularly The Visual Display of Qualitative Information.

Also, here’s an inspiring example of very well done visual display of the big amount of information. Of course it’s not tailored for mobile use, but there are few great ideas.

www.google.com/finance

Google finance chart

Bonus Track

When I was purchasing and downloading the app, I didn’t quite understand why it takes so much time for it to download. Until I realized that it has been downloaded long ago. I have been fooled by the app icon which looks like it is still downloading.