[USAPPS14]

2014 US Mobile & App Design Awards

Bubble Browser for iPad



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Silver 

Project Overview

Bubble Browser is the ultimate app for browsing your Evernote data. Bubble Browser is a visual metaphor for browsing and searching your data. Tags, notebooks and dates are presented as colorful and differently sized bubbles that expose most important information in any context.

Bubble Browser for iPad lets you touch your Evernote data. You can tap any bubble to see and discover new connections between your notebooks, dates, and tags.

Organisation

Macoscope

Team

Macoscope is an award-winning design and development studio from Poland and the first Polish startup dedicated to creating amazing applications strictly for Apple products.

Established in 2009 in Warsaw by three veterans of the software and telecommunications industry and serial founders, Macoscope has set out to channel the creative energy of its experienced staff of designers and developers on to delivering awesome products for Mac and iOS users as well as working with external clients on bringing their ideas for applications to life.

Other Macoscope products include Code Pilot, Birdseye Mail, Nozbe, Invoices, and HUDTube.

www.macoscope.com


The Macoscope Bubble Browser team:

Daniel Owsianski – product owner, team leader and a person behind the idea of Bubble Browser, UX, interaction prototyping

Bartosz Ciechanowski – iOS main developer and designer

Karol Kozub – iOS developer

Rafal Augustyniak – iOS developer

Jarek Pendowski - iOS developer

Dominik Strzalkowski – interface designer

Project Brief

The app was created to facilitate the perusal of information stored inside Evernote accounts. Bubble Browser has been designed to take full advantage of the iPad’s touchscreen capabilities, so that users can experience their Evernote data in a completely new way.

In Bubble Browser for iPad, Evernote tags, notebooks, and dates are represented by colorful bubbles of various sizes, an approach that highlights the most important pieces of information in a given context. By presenting your data in an aesthetic, more natural and approachable way, Bubble Browser for iPad addresses the challenge of ever-growing amounts of information that we have to deal with on a daily basis. Swipe across the screen to navigate through groups of floating bubbles. Tap on them to discover notes and related information. It’s as easy as that.

To paraphrase Steve Jobs speaking at the unveiling of the original iPhone: "You can touch your data.” Bubble Browser for iPad leverages the touch-sensitive capabilities of iPads to presenting data sets as colorful shapes, which, as far as human perception is concerned, is a more natural approach than dealing with raw numbers. Information becomes tactile.

Project Need

A wide variety of ideas and notions influenced the implementation of the visual approach in Bubble Browser for iPad:

*) making the connection with your Evernote data even more personal and direct,

*) employing methods that made searching fun: traditional data exploration methods are dull and might be ineffective; delivering search results in a visual way yields far more interesting and gratifying outcomes,

*) facilitating self-exploration: the ability to discover your own patterns related to information storage, memorization, and retrieval,

*) immediate data access: the ability to quickly filter your information by intersecting tags, notebooks and dates criteria,

*) focus on particular data points: allowing you to see your information in specific contexts which may reveal new relationships between your notes and tags.

User Experience

Bubble Browser introduces Perspective Switching: an easy way to change and mix filtering criteria combined with the ability to immediately return to a general, unfiltered view, as needed.

The app also includes Fisheye Search: a fisheye lens-like search interface that allows you to browse through your tags, search your notebooks or dates more efficiently and presents their contents alphabetically.

The design of the application is sensible, organic, prettier than ever, making Bubble Browser visually appealing and pleasing to use.

Project Marketing

The app wasn’t accompanied by a specially designed marketing campaign.

Key opinion leaders were very fond of the visual approach that the application took to managing and browsing your data as did pro Evernote users who adopted the application at a demonstrably fast pace. Taking to blogs and tech news websites, both groups provided organic word-of-mouth advertising for the application.

Additionally, the word spread about the application in circles that may never have previously heard about Bubble Browser before after the app won Evernote’s own Design Achievement Award in the 2013 Devcup.

Project Privacy

Bubble Browser is fully compliant with security procedures laid down for iOS by Apple. Data is saved only locally on the iPad and the application never modifies any data stored on the user’s Evernote account: it only accesses Evernote metadata like tags, notebooks, etc., while the contents of the notes are downloaded only after the user explicitly tells the app to do so. The same procedure, i.e. “lazy loading,” is employed for downloading attachments stored with notes. The app only downloads what the user decides is necessary and all connections are established via secure channels as per the specifications of the Evernote SDK.




This category relates to Startups working on a Mobile project or an App. The project could be for smartphones, tablet, web, game console or api apps.  Startup projects need to be newly emerging, less than 5 million users and less than 3 years old.


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