Your article talks a lot about the nuances of the app (prototyping animation, specifically) but I'm curious how you were able to distill the experience down to 2 primary use cases - did this come from research, data, customers saying this is what they intend to use the app for?
Did you test any of this with your existing customers? If so, how did you go about that process?
How did you find out what the essential user experience was without talking to users?
What makes you say that? The card interface gives a sense of context--you can still see the stuff behind it. You can pull on the entire card to navigate instead of hitting a small text target. I haven't used the UI, but it looks like it works pretty well.
The card metaphor has no value. No extra information is communicated, and yet it is expensive to program and display.
UIs always look like they work well when demoed by the creator. Show me a usability test with this, and then you'll see the reality.
From what I read you guys jumped right in to the UI design?
