Alchemy by Leban Hyde | UX + Branding

Week 35

Using Snapchat Scan to scan a soda can

WhatsTablet. WhatsApp reportedly has an iPad app under development, joining other messaging apps (like Signal and Telegram) in multi-device support. Of course, as someone currently focusing on tablets, I care most about seeing how they port their phone experience to tablet (sorry, no screenshots in the article).

Android Auto. Google is parking the Android Auto phone app in favor of Google Assistant driving mode. If you have been following Google long enough, you know they are not afraid to kill products. In the case of Android Auto, however, it was the evolution of Assistant that led to its demise, not the failure of the app itself (still available in supported vehicles). Hopefully their users agree.

AR Search. I'm not an active user of Snapchat, but I really like this notion of visual search. No, Snap is not the only company to explore this functionality. And, no, it doesn't work 100% as advertised. But nothing works perfectly on first release. It's the potential — and underlying technologies — that excite me!

App Store. On the business side of things, Apple settles a lawsuit to allow use of payment systems outside of App Store. This means that developers who process any purchases outside of their app will not have to pay a commission for said purchase to Apple. Microsoft announced similar payment flexibility for their devs back in June, so I'm not surprised to see Apple follow suit.

UX Process. Product archeology is something I've practiced for some time now, although I didn't always call it by that name. This post by UX Collective describes what it is, why it matters, and how to do it.

Re: Robots! I shared last week that Tesla had announced Tesla Bot. What I failed to mention, however, is the video that went with it. Enjoy?

From the desk of…

A buddy of mine encouraged me to share a bit of what I'm working on as a way to connect the dots between the articles I share (the theory) to the work I actually do (the practice). I haven't done this before, but it's crazy enough it just might work. So here it goes…

This week, I'm currently working on porting over a messaging & chat feature from a phone app to tablet app as part of a cross-channel effort. A lot of what I'm addressing, outside of trying to understand the problem space as a whole, is how to properly scale a phone view into a tablet view. Fortunately, there is plenty of precedent on both iOS/iPadOS and Android for how to accomplish this (see also: the article above on WhatsApp).

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