Constraints.
One of the very first things we defined at the onset of our iPhone project were our constraints. We’ve had the luxury of sitting back and observing a lot of success and failure in the AppStore. The one thread that seemed to be tried and true was the correlation of success and an app’s ability to focus on a central task. We had to define up front what our app’s central task would be, for us it ended up being the chat window. Campfire is all about communicating through chat, it had to be the area that we placed the most focus. We had to make it extremely fast, intuitive and a pleasure to read messages from other users.
I would argue that to date we have spent at least 85% of our time around this one view. It has affected our code development and the countless number of visual iterations. Another area we looked at was settings. For 1.0 we made a conscious choice to focus around a single Campfire account instead of offering multi-account support at launch. This choice freed up a lot of time both in development and design to focus on getting that chat window right. We’re conscious of the fact that this will more than likely be a highly requested feature, but the costs were too high for us to include it in the initial launch.
Looking back we benefited a lot from our initial discussion around constraints. It lead us to what we believe is a much more enjoyable experience. If we hadn’t placed this at the forefront of our talks we would either still be in development on the app or would have had to make sacrifices to the overall experience along the way.
