Making It Match
This week I gave RightNow a redesign.
The main problem was that the website and the app looked like two different products. Different colours, different feel. Going from one to the other was a bit jarring. So I took the actual brand colours out of the app (the green and the orange) and rebuilt the site around them. Same colours, same font, same logo. Now they match.
While I was in there I softened the look a bit. Rounded corners instead of sharp ones, a little more depth on the cards. The capacity bar now fills from green to orange as your day fills up, so the colour gives you a sense of how full you are before you even read the numbers.
The orange end still needs work, though. When you’re properly oversubscribed it should look more alarming than it does right now, and at the moment it’s a bit tame. That’s on the list.
The dark mode on the site has a faint green glow in the background that I liked, so I’m pulling that into the app too.
None of this changes what the app does: same features as last week. But it feels more finished, and that counts for something.
On the money side, I’m working on Stripe payments at the moment. I’d love to get a bit of pocket money out of this, especially if people actually enjoy it and start using the cloud sync, which is where the real costs land for me. The free version isn’t changing though: the app stays free on your own device. It’s only the syncing across devices I’ll charge for, since that’s the part I’m paying to run, lol.
And I really don’t want to be beholden to advertisers. I’d rather you paid for the app so I can make it work for you, not for an advertiser. If it’s a good product, that’s what should get it sold, not playing the advertising game with your attention.
I also cleared out some old clutter while I was at it. There were four different UI “styles” buried in the settings that nobody needed, and a couple of dead pages on the site. Gone now.
The devil really is in the details, isn’t it.
What I actually need to do next is get this published on Android properly: find some testers, work out the whole process. But my real job has been full-on for the last six months, and on top of that I’ve got a 12-week-old puppy. Finding the time to look after real people testing the app is going to be a challenge. Maybe that’s why I keep putting it off.