The Current Problem
Working as a contractor for Smudge Laboratories out of Newport Beach, who specialized in Enterprise Mobile Solutions for the medical industry, I was able to work directly with ZEISS during the initial engagement.
ZEISS currently had an existing iPad App that was poorly received by their sales team. The client identified that the sales team was reluctant to use the app due to its poor user experience. Some of the top complaints reported were a poor navigation, extremely small touch areas, poor UI quality, and nested tables that only spanned 50% of the screen. Overall, the purpose of the app was to increase sales conversion by creating estimates at the client site. ZEISS knew that the entire UX needed to be designed from the ground up.
Wireframes
After several days of reviewing the current app, I identified two issues that could be resolved. One, the user flow for creating an estimate had too many side menus and modals/overlays for selecting options. And the second, there was no clear navigation for each major step in the user flow, such as a standard step 1, step 2 and so on. The navigation also suffered from menus within menus and sometimes one more level deep. That's got to leave a user pretty frustrated when all they want to do is tap about 3-4 items and the navigation is giving them about 8-12 taps.
The first wireframes that were created didn't have too many differences from what is shown here. There were two scenarios that the client was really happy that we solved for them. One, I designed the start screen to be overly simple displaying two large choices for a user to create a new estimate or open an existing estimate. The second, was the step-by-step walkthrough for the sales user which clearly identified where you were in the estimation process. A few tweaks here and there to the wireframes, but the client was energetic to see how the entire app would eventually role out.
Visual
ZEISS originally requested that the app follow a similar style to ZEISS brand guidelines and some existing ZEISS apps. I was bound to use a brand color scheme and use brand photos (if needed). When approaching the visual design, I targeted one main usability goal. That goal was to make the tap areas plentiful, simple and clearly identifiable, especially for any of the navigation ui elements.
