Hey,
I love my line-us :), but I gave the app 2 or 3 stars in the appstore because it’s really confusing when you use it the first time and everything feels mixed-up. I think the focus should be on the drawing screen because now it’s like jumping around and search for the functions. On the ipad it’s “okey” because you’ve the drawing area and the functions on the same screen.
So I’ve started to redesign it. Maybe this could help you to improve the app and is a little inspiration.
This is a link to the design file I work with: Figma Design File (Left corner on the burger menu you can switch between different stages)
Click Dummie (you can start this by yourself when you click on the figma link and than in the upper right corner on the play button)
This looks really nice! I agree that on a phone it gets a bit difficult to flip flop back and forth between the drawing screen and tool selection/configuration. Overall the mechanisms by which you select and configure modes and tools is a bit “quirky” as well.
I wonder how the app is built… must be some form of cross-platform framework.
Thanks @carlhauser - really appreciate your thoughts. You’re right, the app was primarily designed for iPad (so landscape mode). The phone (portrait) version was added quite late in the development when we found we could add it without too much work - we really expected it to be mainly used for viewing and drawing to Line-us rather than creating drawings so you’re right to say the app isn’t optimised for drawing on the phone. The app is written in AS3/AIR - at some point we’re likely to move to something more modern and at that point we’ll have a re-think of the UI. For now though we’re focussing on new features (we’re working on Z axis levelling at the moment for example) so no major UI changes for now unfortunately.
Yesterday I’ve unpacked the Line-us I’ve received as a present. I was truly amazed how sexy it looks, how well and thoughfully it’s packaged. But when I’ve opened the companion app, I thought I’m dreaming. I honestly can’t comprehend how such a broken app could make it beyond a draft. It’s just unbelievable how such a cool and unique product gets limited by such a terrifying interface. I am sure there are reasons for choices you’ve made, but I honestly felt as if I’d gotten a Lamborghini but the only way to get in and out is from beneath, every time.
I don’t know how it’s possible a company that is able to create such a cool device intended for designers, tinkerers and creative community in general, can let such a thing happen. Especially after asking for more than €100 per piece. @carlhauser here has for free portrayed a pretty good direction for the Line-us companion interface, how to make it easy to grasp and what it needs to leverage the tool’s creative potential. You should think twice before turning it down and instead focus on fixing this problem of broken UX before adding more and more features to it, until it falls completely apart and you’ll need to rework it anyway.
I am of course no one to tell you what you should do with your product. I’m just saying Line-us is operated by an app that is so discouraging to use that it renders it almost unusable. This negatively impacts retention and growth of your userbase and therefore your revenue. The sooner you hire a proper product designer that will make Line-us a solid interface it deserves, the sooner you can add new features to a solid foundation. The fate of the unique tool with a great potential Line-us unquestionably is, is reliant upon an intuitive interface that encourages creativity.
I don’t intend to attack you here. Those are just two cents from a designer that creates apps for living and wants Line-us to be accessible to a wider audience, as it may inspire many.
Really sorry to hear you’re finding the App frustrating but we do appreciate and are listening to the feedback. There are definitely some compromises in the UI - we wanted something that would work across iOS, Android (tablet and phone) MAC and Windows with a single codebase. We primarily designed for a landscape format - as I mentioned the portrait format was something we added quite late in the process. I think there are more phone (portrait) users using the app for drawing than we expected - we thought people would create drawings primarily on tablets, and use the phone UI for browsing/drawing to Line-us.
We’d love to do a re-design and to move to a more modern development environment right away - but for now the plan is to stay with what we have for a little longer. Partly this is to see what direction cross platform development goes - in particular Flutter, which looks like a promising option but also there are some features that we want to add that we think people will really appreciate. For example we are just about to release a version with the ability to do z axis (height) mapping, and we’re looking at how to do x-y mapping to improve the skew that you can sometimes see in drawings.
Probably not the response you were hoping for, but thanks again for letting us know your thoughts, we do appreciate it.
