One of the first tasks as Ushahidi’s Mobile Project Manager, is to deliver the much-anticipated Ushahidi iPhone app. We’ve had an iPhone app in the works for the past year, however a lot has changed since we first envisioned the app. For example, background processing is now available on the iPhone 4.0, and the iPad now offers a much larger screen real estate.
So if we built the app from the ground up, what would it look like? How could we design the app to be as simple as possible, and yet still familiar to the user?
After some discussion about the current iPhone app prototype, I’ve realized the desired Ushahidi app functionality mirrors that of the current Apple Mail app.
| Apple Mail | Ushahidi App |
| Allows you to access multiple inboxes | Should allow you to access any of the Ushahidi deployments |
| Selecting an inbox will display the email for that account | Selecting an Ushahidi instance should display the list of reports |
| Selecting an email displays the full details | Selecting an incident should display the full report details |
| You can forward an email to your friends | You should be able to share an incident with friends via Email, Facebook or Twitter |
| A new email is created via a modal dialog | You should be able to create new report in the same famous |
So, taking those points into consideration, I created a new iPhone and iPad project using the Apple Mail app as a model. Below is a Prezi demonstrating the proposed application flow:
This is the first attempt at re-thinking the Ushahidi app, so your feedback is always welcome.
You can view the current Ushahidi iPhone code at: http://github.com/ushahidi/Ushahidi_iPhone
Note, this blog article was originally posted here.
5 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.
Please don’t restrict mobile app to one particular platform. This is not in the spirit of Ushahidi. Android offers more openness and available in more countries then the iPhone eco-system. I hope your strategy would be to build around a more open system and provide iPhone app only as a necessity.
Most of the places where Ushahidi is deployed are either too poor to afford a iPhone even if it’s available.
Ajay, I definitely agree, it’s important to target all mobile platforms. Ushahidi currently offers J2ME, Android and Windows Mobile apps which can be downloaded at: http://download.ushahidi.com.
We’ve wanted to include an iPhone app to that list for awhile now, so hopefully with help from the community we can release an iPhone app soon, offering people another platform for accessing Ushahidi.
The presentation does not leverage the horizontal orientations of both the iPhone and iPad, allowing for a higher resolution that can be leveraged for better information display?
Sanjana
Sanjana, thanks for the feedback. I’ve enabled landspace mode for all views now.
I’m trying to download the app but being told it is not currently available – is it just me?