Improving our tablet experience

My Role: Sr. Product Designer

Team: 1 PM, 2 Mobile Devs

Platforms: iPads, Android tablets and Chromebooks

PROBLEM

The current tablet app wasn’t great. It was pretty much a larger version of the phone with no specific designs. We had just redesigned out mobile app and now we wanted to introduce our new designs to tablet. We were also building our first Chromebook app.

GOALS

Intentional design for tablets by taking advantage of the larger screen real estate and optimize for keyboard use.

MY TASKS

• End-to-end design for a complete overhaul

• Prototyping designs for user testing

• Prepare handoff and work with developers

Architecture

I introduced a permanent sidebar that expands and collapses. This felt like a better use of space, allowing users to quickly navigate without having to open up the menu. It was also consistent with the desktop experience. Keeping consistency in mind, we also added the ability to use keyboard shortcuts for users with keyboards.

Menus

On phones, all the menus slide up from the bottom. For tablet, I decided to have the screens pop-up at the location you tapped on. This felt faster with less having to reorient where the menu is.

Expanded Formatting Bar

On tablets we have so much more width and therefore room for more icons in the formatting bar. We pulled analytics to see the most frequent actions to decide what we wanted to add.

Light & Dark Modes