Designing the Verizon Apps Store

Posted on July 5th, by tim in 3D, Animation, Graphic, Latest, Mobile, Motion, News, Photography, Portfolio. No Comments

After a year of design and development, the new Verizon Apps store has launched to about 4 million devices, and will roll out to a total of around 22 million devices by the end of July, 2012.

The store is a ground-up redesign of the storefront application pre-loaded to the majority of Verizon Android devices. ADG was hired in January of 2011 to conduct a tactical redesign of Verizon’s prior store, and then a wholesale redesign of the store – for both smartphones and tablets – to be launched in 2012.

Key Features

Monochromatic framework to present highly flexible merchandising options

Simple UI controls with clear catalog navigation cues

Dramatically improved merchandising options for developers

“Responsive” mobile GUI to handle screen sizes resolution from wrist-top devices up to – potentially – tv screen size devices.

Full-screen dynamic wallpaper backgrounds, changing the face of the store daily

Support for hundreds of thousands of Verizon-curated apps

Sophisticated “store home” widget implementation, enabling dynamic merchandising and promotions, deep-links within the store, and personalized user messaging

Sophisticated search and filtering options, including user stored preferences

User app reviews and ratings

Application screen shots

Portrait and landscape handling on both smartphones and tablets

Facebook (and more to come) integration

Dynamic server-side catalog management, ability to change categories, apps, without new binary

Support for external SMS promotions with deep-linking within store

Many more advanced mobile storefront features

Design Assets

The store design required 45 major releases of the application wireframes (sample provided below). The master Photoshop asset files – for smartphone and tablet formats – were among the most sophisticated we have created.

Launch Video

We also, during the course of the project, created a number of rapid prototypes for specific design approaches and use-cases. These included relatively simple on-line HTML interactives up to high def visualization videos (one of which was used for the app store public announcement by Verizon’s CMO at their developer’s conference in Vegas in September, 2011, see Launch Video link).

Verizon Wireframe Sample (PDF)

ADG worked closely with the Verizon internal server-side teams, and client-side developer UI Evolution in Seattle, over the course of the project. While some key meetings and reviews were conducted physically (in Basking Ridge, NJ or Seattle), most reviews, design meetings, asset delivery / refinement, specification archival, etc. were done remotely via collaborative tools.

All in all a successful project despite the relative scale and complexity; e.g. deployment of a secure commerce platform (including in-app purchase support), increasing the resolution of developer app merchandising assets, building in flexible yet simple user filtering, searching and sorting options, designing for a wide array of Android device types and screen resolutions, designing for significant enhancement without fundamental changes to the app presentation framework.