Functional apps don’t sell anymore. The iPhone has changed everything: now they have to be delightful too. Johnny Holland says that fun is the new usability.

The following videos give you a peek into the process of designing a delightful iPhone app.

Caught on tape: Adaptive Path imagining the delightful (not just the functional)

Smart.fm iPhone App: Learning Experience Concepts, 1 of 2 from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Smart.fm could have slapped together a pretty decent app with the typical flash card interface. That would be decent; it wouldn’t be delightful. Delightful interfaces go the extra mile, they jump out of the box and capture the imagination. Best of all, they sell.

Designing a delightful app in 2 minutes

Convert Design Evolution from tap tap tap on Vimeo.

What an excellent case study! The unit converter app market already had plenty of excellent options, including the delightful ConvertBot but the guys at Tap Tap Tap came in and shook up the market again: they won with function+delight. The combination is genius.

ConvertBot will always have a market: it is more delightful than Convert; but Convert will win out in the end because it found the best compromise between function and delight.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 11:37 pm and is filed under iPhone App Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.