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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1359241
Origin of the Feature The Making of an Adobe Mobile App By Ric Getter Photos courtesy of Adobe www.adobe.com It is still too easy to picture programmers working in darkened rooms, hunched screens crawling with incomprehensible code out of a scene befitting The Matrix. But that doesn’t explain how so many programs are so elegantly designed, they seem to almost predict how you would most want to work with them. That begs the question, just how do they do that? Most of the credit goes to the user experience designers, more artist than computer geek and more comfortable with programs like Illustrator, Photoshop, and especially Adobe XD than Objective-C or Python. Adobe recently offered us a virtual peek behind the scenes into their now-virtual development labs to learn about the origins of two of their most popular mobile apps, Illustrator for the iPad and Fresco for the iPhone. When Fresco moved to the iPhone, the designers didn’t have to start completely from scratch, It was already a very successful mobile app. But it still offered a significant challenge: fitting one of Adobe’s most popular tablet apps for artists to an iPhone screen. The goal was to achieve feature parity while accommodating human anatomy—the same size of fingers would need to be comfortable on both kinds of devices. Brooke Hopper has been experience designer at Adobe for over five years, with some impressive credentials before then as well as an MFA in the burgeoning field. She’s now the Lead Designer for Drawing and Painting interfaces. She told us, “One of the reasons Fresco on the iPhone has been so successful is that we didn’t start from a blank page – Adobe has offered mobile creative apps for years.” And that led to another user experience consideration, the interface continuity Adobe likes to offer, “so it was important that any system or pattern we created for Fresco needed to work with other existing