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How polished UI (icon) helped my iPad app's downloads (stats inside)

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Re: How polished UI (icon) helped my iPad app's downloads (stats inside)

#51

Post by paulyan »

89a wrote: post #37
paulyan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as a young startup, it's important to balance between attractiveness and expense, Dribbble is too expensive for me...

Get what you pay for. Considering a good designer will control every interaction between users and your product then $500 is a bargain (I personally wouldn't have touched this project for that much).

If going into interaction details, i would prefer to work face to face as communication would become a problem. And in-house designer would be more than $500, i guess...

Re: How polished UI (icon) helped my iPad app's downloads (stats inside)

#52

Post by dthedavid »

I find it a problem when you have 2 UI designers and cannot come up with a great design on day one. Your new design isn't spectacular either. A great resource is to look at the designs of all of your competitors and understand what is great about all of them.

Also $50 for an icon is very cheap. At that price, I'm not sure how it would motivate any good designer to spend even an hour on a design. I usually pay $150-$300 per icon for my apps (smartieants.com) and I find it barely enough to keep the designer motivated.

Re: How polished UI (icon) helped my iPad app's downloads (stats inside)

#53

Post by paulyan »

dthedavid wrote: post #52

I find it a problem when you have 2 UI designers and cannot come up with a great design on day one. Your new design isn't spectacular either. A great resource is to look at the designs of all of your competitors and understand what is great about all of them. Also $50 for an icon is very cheap. At that price, I'm not sure how it would motivate any good designer to spend even an hour on a design. I usually pay $150-$3…

looking at competitors or parent product (in my case "Instagram") is definitely effective. However, i have to take the copycat name...

Designer is very expensive for sure. Which country are your designers from? Mine is india, so relatively cheap.

Re: How polished UI (icon) helped my iPad app's downloads (stats inside)

#54

Post by dthedavid »

paulyan wrote: post #53
dthedavid wrote: post #52

I find it a problem when you have 2 UI designers and cannot come up with a great design on day one. Your new design isn't spectacular either. A great resource is to look at the designs of all of your competitors and understand what is great about all of them. Also $50 for an icon is very cheap. At that price, I'm not sure how it would motivate any good designer to spend even an hour on a design. I usually pay $150-$3…

looking at competitors or parent product (in my case "Instagram") is definitely effective. However, i have to take the copycat name... Designer is very expensive for sure. Which country are your designers from? Mine is india, so relatively cheap.

My designers are from Europe and South East Asia.

Re: How polished UI (icon) helped my iPad app's downloads (stats inside)

#55

Post by digitalengineer »

paulyan wrote: post #49
digitalengineer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The danger in "trying" is you'll get something lots of other people might also have (with perhaps a little tweaking). Twitter did this as well back in the day and ended up realy regretting it. You can not protect your corporate identity if it's based upon unorigional work.

Thanks @digitalengineer for this meaningful discussion. Yes we absolutely should build up our own design team. Blindly keep trying woundn't work either. It's still the art of balancing. Trying various ways in the beginning, and at some time point, we should tight up all kinds of resources and build up our own for key resources. Design is resources with key value. Compared with criticism about copycat or intentional c…

You're on HN so I'd say your doing quite well! Keep it up, just keep improving. Heck, just look at twitter now! Theyhad a shutterstock design as well. All in good time...

Re: How polished UI (icon) helped my iPad app's downloads (stats inside)

#56

Post by paulyan »

89a wrote: post #35

> Wooden texture is a fashionable design in 2012. It’s said to be good for photo viewing app. Our design combines wooden texture with transparent glass. It has the metaphor that your iPad is a wooden table, you put glass on it and photo over the glass. It’s good, isn’t it? > It costs us $50, but absolutely worth the money > Brush Script used as a logo This is a fucking joke… right?

Hey @89a, can you detail which is the joke? Maybe what we did is stupid. But that's what we genuinely thought, tried and shared. We are serious to develop a good enough Instagram ipad app as we're not satisfied with existing solutions. And that's why people love our app even there are already dozens out there.

Re: How polished UI (icon) helped my iPad app's downloads (stats inside)

#57

Post by sabret00the »

Polished everything helps. I think some research was done the other day that shows users look at Icons then Screenshots then Reviews or something like that. Not enough devs/organisations understand the importance of showing the latest design and the impact it has on their customers.
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