How many times have you had the urge to smash your phone just because App that worked yesterday doesn’t work anymore? or it says “system under maintenance” just when you are in dire need to reload your account. These apps don’t function properly as well as poorly designed. As a Sri Lankan I come across many poorly designed mobile applications throughout my day. Yet the majority of the users don’t mind this and they’ve adapted themselves to the app and not the other way. Those are just tools to ease our workflow, so they must be built to last. Being a designer, I can’t help myself to point out the flaws I see. So here’s a written version of my rants.

### First Culprit is “Mobitel Selfcare” app by Mobitel. It’s simply an all-in-one app enabling users to control their mobile package. You can reload, activate plans etc. It’s a convenient app made to ease the workflow of users instead of going online to activate a package. But many questions lie within the design of the app itself. From the on-boarding to the way settings are placed are somewhat of a chaos. Disclaimer that this is entirely my view as a designer and this isn’t meant to be universal. Take me as a person who likes to see quality products rather than some rectangles put together and call it an app.

### **On-boarding process**

```cv
gallery
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```

Current on-boarding process include a screen to select a language, which I appreciate. The fact that it has a separate screen let users to digest slowly without a hassle, After you select a language and proceed you arrive at a place where I see a chinatown. Terms & conditions, a page we usually ignore. What I’ve done differently here is that give user the option of viewing the Terms & Conditions or not, it makes sure that they are in control. And the design of T&C screen is a joke, even if a user tries to view/read it, It certainly creates this imaginary barrier attempting to keep the user away from scrolling till the end. So the next one is verification process which is quite straight forward. I’d rate this process 4/10.

### **Home screen**

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FPDLQFDksLpgobJYoJFp1C84RKSr1%2FkzoMEWV6QspfPSk1gqDM%2Ff42577c9-07da-41ab-b4f4-7913ea833bc2.png?alt=media&token=51ecc2fa-bdbb-44bb-b9dc-d8dbd51306ce","id":"f42577c9-07da-41ab-b4f4-7913ea833bc2","width":3651,"height":1825,"filename":"Group 24.png","type":"image/png","caption":"home screen","border":false}]}
```

Overall a pretty good/solid structure, and why there’s a side-bar instead a navigation-bar like any other app. I mean if they’ve trying to be creative and took a novel approach, kudos to them actually. It’d have been much better if they’ve executed it more close to perfection or better than average. What I see is redundancy of elements, in both side-bar and the home-screen as well. It’s like they’ve run out of elements to put in and put randoms things there. If it were to be a good app there should be a flow, I don’t see that here.\
What I’d done differently is that Add a navigation bar and categorize them into different pages like Home, Services, Settings etc. Then it’d be far easier to navigate through the app.

Then onto the Main content, first we see a package promotion/ advertisement. It’s just a image which is hard to read, and most likely a JPEG, you can see the white edges as well. Who’d click this? if not for a misclick I don’t think anyone with a sane mind would dare to click this. They really should’ve analyze heat maps of the app and will conclude that for sure. My suggestion is that take some of the use of space more and design them more clickable, Add a CTA button to make it more immersive.

Then we see a account details, it’s more straight-forward nothing to add there. Next the status of the account; balance, data, calls etc. Instead of two separate boxes for balance and data/calls I’d suggest a single container prioritizing balance. User can switch tabs to see amount of data remaining.

Then it’s Quick Actions and Other apps, I’d keep some most used actions(maybe only 3) and others at a separate screen that a user can navigate through the navigation-bar.\
I'd again rate this whole screen 4/10.

That concludes my quick rant on On-boarding and Home-screen of Mobitel selfcare App. Feel free to share your thoughts.

Roasting Apps from my country

## **What's a footer?**

When we pay attention to most generic websites we find on the internet, we can analyze that there are certainly three main parts that make up a site. These are the pillars which hold a website when presented to the user. Those are the Header, Body, and Footer. Given that our attention span is quite low compared to the early 2000s, we tend to skip sites where we can’t actually find what we are looking for. Hence, there emerged a tendency to grab the user’s attention in the first few seconds of a visit to a site, by making the Header look much cooler than it used to be. We came from static, boring landing pages to animated, flashy landing pages as a result. Consequently, the attention paid to ‘well-designed’ footers faded into nothingness. Yeah, it may be exaggerated, but that’s the gist of what happened.

You may ask, “why do we need a footer?” or “what’s there in a footer?”. Let’s pay our attention to the second one first.

## **What should be in it?**

A footer is a place where we can find the branding of the site, Quick links, Socials or Contact info, CTA/Newsletter, Privacy statement, and even Blog articles. You could say it is the summary of the site to view from afar.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FPDLQFDksLpgobJYoJFp1C84RKSr1%2FptKYKeKF5CCQJUDQ4hl1%2Ff67e026e-f77a-4ed3-af1d-63e9bd137af1.png?alt=media&token=efbd2d8e-f8c5-48c1-8e61-4173eedf9cca","id":"f67e026e-f77a-4ed3-af1d-63e9bd137af1","width":649,"height":361,"filename":"Screenshot 2023-11-10 090234.png","type":"image/png","caption":"footer from uxpin.com","border":false}]}
```

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FPDLQFDksLpgobJYoJFp1C84RKSr1%2FptKYKeKF5CCQJUDQ4hl1%2F6a437202-d42d-4284-a99f-472039c4d633.png?alt=media&token=10b4d1de-15e6-4609-bba2-dfc345de9cd8","id":"6a437202-d42d-4284-a99f-472039c4d633","width":684,"height":82,"filename":"Screenshot 2023-11-10 090429.png","type":"image/png","caption":"footer from khushboomehrotra.in","border":true}]}
```

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FPDLQFDksLpgobJYoJFp1C84RKSr1%2FptKYKeKF5CCQJUDQ4hl1%2Ffc35b031-9352-498a-b16b-bba17a41060a.png?alt=media&token=2899509c-7db1-42a1-94be-144fbf9200be","id":"fc35b031-9352-498a-b16b-bba17a41060a","width":666,"height":485,"filename":"Screenshot 2023-11-10 090523.png","type":"image/png","caption":"footer from chase.com","border":false}]}
```

## The need of a footer?

So why a footer? As I said in the previous section, it contains the summary of the whole site. A well-designed footer can give answers to almost all the questions a user may have like, “what’s this site about?”, “where can I contact them?”, “where’s the about section?” and so on. So another reason why we need a footer is that it is kind of a safe place for a user who’s lost on a site, he/she can always rely on the footer to guide them through the site. It’s the last thing a user sees of your site, so it should be given the same treatment as the header to give a sense of consistency to the user about your site.

This might have made you change your perspective on footers as a whole. So long live footers!

Footers need love too...

UX/UI Designer

Score is a WatchOS app that enables users to view live scores and stats of football matches. This is a case study regarding the app and the study I've done.

Score App - UX/UI Case Study at portfolio project

This is a concept design for an online bookstore called "unbound".

Bookstore App UI

This is a 90 day UI Challenge for improving myself.

90 Days UI Challenge

I worked as an Intern UI Designer where I gained experience on designing websites for numerous fields from medical, government, automobile.

Uvindu Harshana

2023