First time designing for an iPad app
First of all, I don’t have any design background both from college nor bootcamp. But, I wanted to share my journey on designing an iPad apps for the first time.
So, I have to build a management apps that will show analytics page on an iPad. And around ~ in the middle of 2020 until end of year, Apple announces iOS 14, Big Sur, etc. And of course WWDC held by Apple is always a big deal both for designers, programmers… Or developers in general.
Having that concern, what I wanted to share is that, Apple has a new approach on designing an iPad apps.
So, let’s get into it.
And here I wanted to encourage you to watch and learn WWDC documentation presented by Grant Paul and Vince Lane (Apple Design Team) titled “Designed for iPad”. And you will find how Apple encourage us as a designer, to design our app with their design guideline named Human Interface Guideline.
So, what’s new?
As for me, after I watched the videos, I could understand how Apple tries to increase efficiency on their new sidebar concept. Where, they encourage us to updating our apps layout and take full advantage of large screen as our first step on designing an iPad app and here they are also introducing us new split views or “the Great New Sidebar Navigation”
Let’s get our hand dirty!
Before the update, I think their developer is using auto layout feature here. Auto Layout dynamically calculates the size and position of all the views in your view hierarchy, based on constraints placed on those views. Here you can see how they don’t differentiate their iPad design with their iPhone design.
As result we have a lot of un-used white spaces / empty spaces area where it’s not efficient at all. So, here is the empty space area.
Make sense right?
Now, can you see the different? Here, we can see both navigation control needed and also filled with more content we wanted to see.
Another example.
Now that we have a bigger screen, doesn’t mean that we need to draw bigger icon just like in iOS 12, now they told us to be more thoughtful of our user, where they design smaller icon here, but big enough and easy enough to see, to read and to tap on by the user.
By having more use of the available screen space, we have such powerful apps in our hand!
So yea, I think that’s all for today.
Here are some references :
