Car Starter is now Car Dash. Updated to v2.0 after Design Consultation with Toledo2

Let me start this post by thanking DVLUP for providing a free 1-hour design consultation to me and 24 other Windows Phone developers. If you’re a Windows Phone Developer and aren’t a DVLUP member you’re missing out on a great rewards program and you should go join, do it now. When you join DVLUP you can use XP to get rewards like Nokia devices and gift cards, they also recently added design consultations as rewards. Check them out here: 1 hour consultation, advanced consultation and pro consultation. To promote these new rewards they gave out 25 of the 1 hour consultations for free.

My consultation with Arturo Toledo was all over Skype and was recorded as an mp4 file that I received a few days later for reference. He started by showing me a UI flow diagram constructed from a collection of screenshots of my app. This in itself was pretty cool to look at and it’s something that I’d recommend app developers to do on their own. Seeing everything laid out like this really makes you think about your user experience and can highlight cumbersome UI flow.

This is just a portion of the UI flow diagram Toledo2 created for Car Dash.

Arturo quickly began giving suggestions and showing me possible design changes I could make using Expression Design. He had a lot of great ideas, many of which made it into my recent version 2.0 update. Here’s a summary of the design changes I implemented:

Use of a panorama control instead of a pivot for the Time & Battery and Apps, Settings and Weather Display.

Font and Layout changes to Time & Battery display

Removal of software back buttons to close popup windows. They can now be closed by the hardware back button, or a double tap gesture on the window.

There were other suggestions that might make it into a future update. But I’m very pleased with the new design changes, and I expect my users will be too.

I was very fortunate to be one of the 25 developers able to try this service for free, but I would definitely consider using this service again with my DVLUP XP and I would recommend other windows phone devs to do the same.