Professional Design for mainstream users #1111

Nowadays every popular app has a fancy design. I think the designers of the bitcoin client made a great job at doing a design which functions well and easy to use, it is already much better than the initial version.

Although I see that there is space for improvements, and I honestly believe that design does matter if we want to reach the masses.

My proposition is that I will donate $300 for this, if you are willing to go for a new design at 99Designs.com (http://99designs.com/mobile-app-design).

Here we can have 50+ design ideas for $599+ and choose only the one which we (the BitCoin community) likes the best. This design could be used then for both desktop and (future) mobile clients.

I haven't contacted 99Designs yet, but I would like to know if you guys are interested in this, and if you are open to extend my donation with $299 to make this happen.

10$ from me.

I'm in for $200

I agree that some parts could use a redesign (especially the icons, or the transactions details dialog). However, the goal is not to have a "fancy design" but to get in the way as little as possible. So, integrate with the OS native interface where possible (see for example #1222), and make use of Qt instead of work against it. I'd prefer not to have some custom interface that sticks out like a sore thumb in every environment. Fashionable usually means "gets old very fast".

What is very welcome UI-wise is increasing usability, also for disabled persons. Work on the send coins / receive coins workflow, which is the arguably the most important part of the interface.

However, if you want to reach the masses, your money is better spent making promotion material, easier integration into shopping carts and vendor sites, and so on. That's where the shoe pinches at the moment.

I can partly agree, but I also need to disagree on some points.

Let's say that I want to pay for something on a website. The client is running on my desktop/iPhone/Android then I click on the bitcoin URI to make the payment (actully I think its implementation is not working yet, see #1110). The ideal situation would be if I needed only one more click/tap to confirm the payment. So I agree on workflow optimization.

Designwise, do you guys think GitHub is fashionable? Joomla.org? Microsoft.com? Dwolla.com? I don't think they're fashionable in the classic way, they just have nice and clean designs. And I think it is critical for the users nowadays. No one will care about a technically good software (except the geeks like we are, of course) if that's not fancy in a good way.

Disabled access is important, but I would argue how many people we loose as users because of that compared to the looks and not-optimized workflow.

On the other hand I also understand the Qt has its limitations and it is a difficult job to make a custom made design work on all platforms.

And I also agree on your comment on the integration part, BitCoin needs a ton of work on the integration part as well.

My original $300 offer still stands, but for this we obviously need support from the bitcoin client developers as well.

Let me know what you think.

You're comparing a desktop program to websites. No, I don't think excel, openoffice and other business tools are "fancy" or "fashionable" (you could claim exactly the opposite, they're boring). They are optimized for usability and platform integration. Also, organizations such as Github have the resources to pull off complete redesigns every few years, which makes it easy to be fashionable then if you just have to settle on something that preferably works for the next 10 years.

This software doesn't run on Android and iPhone. Those versions are completely separate projects: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Software#Mobile_apps.

Also note that Qt interface design is very different from web design (after all, we need to work with the platform widgets). If you just drop some Photoshop mockups on us, there's a large chance we cannot do much with it. To be useful, the designer would have to work with Qt designer interface builder.

Anyway -- enough talk. If you feel like doing anything for the project, that's great. If that involves donating money, that's also great, but mind that there is no currently no bitcoin organization to handle that. And if there was, the money would be used to improve testing methodology (static verification, protocol fuzzing) and monitoring of the main network. After all, losing a few users due to frustration is nothing compared to losing the network.

You're right, I compared web sites to desktop programs because I thought that it is easier to demonstrate than desktop applications.

Ok, I understand that it's would be too much time to integrate the Photoshop design, and you don't want to waste your time on it. I approached the question of design from the user's perspective not the programmer. As a user I would be glad to have an easy-to-use bitcoin client with the same nice design for desktop, Android and iPhone.

I close this issue now, but if anything changes I am happy to help to fund a redesign procedure.

Keep up the good work!