Last week we presented a 0.9 version of one of our B2B Sales iPad Apps to our client’s (a large Dutch bank) program board. We have been working on this project since September and have been showing sketches, prototypes and designs before. However this was the first time we showed the actual App.

Before we started the demo I presented a few slides about our design principles for B2B Apps like this.

As the App is going to be used in 1 on  1 sales meetings by our client, it is important that the App itself is as “invisible” as possible. The iPad hardware does a pretty good job at getting out of the way. The App should do the same. After all: in a sales meeting focus needs to be on the customer and not on the device – nor on the App running on that device.

To get there we made sure that the interaction design “just works”. Any gesture the sales person or client might be using works. We don’t care if you swipe or tap or drag.

Furthermore the App is very responsive, buttons are easy to touch and the whole experience is very fast. This way, after each interaction, focus can switch back to the customer right away. As it should be. We think we did a great job with this App to get there – and luckily the client agreed.

The recipe to a smooth experience: handcrafted code

During the presentation I also showed a photo I took last week of the notepad of Guit-Jan, one of our iOS Engineers. It’s a picture of a calculation of the formula needed to get the animation behaviour of a stack of cards we use in our App exactly right.
As said above, we spend a lot of time on these little details. We handcraft each and every line of code. However to a customer it feels just as it should be – and therefore nothing special.

As someone wise (I believe it was Jobs?) said: to make things simple is very hard work.

That is the challenge with the level of quality that we provide. If we don’t do it the App will work well and our customers won’t complain. However if you do get all these details right they rave about how great the App works without being able to point out why exactly. It just feels magical.

Showing the scribbles of Guit-Jans calculation (which in itself is certainly no rocket science but just one of these details) beforehand helped the customer to realize the attention to detail we put in the App.

And when we showed the actual stack of cards animating beautifully across the screen our audience shouted out: “there! that is the sinus!“

That of course made us smile.