Reverse Engineering Blinkist
Most of us use some sort of app to do many different things during our 24hrs, whether it is buying clothes, ordering food, listening to music or to have a quick guided meditation on the metro after work. All of these apps have their own interaction design and user flow. By creating a skeleton, which we in this case refer as Wireframes, is how we can determine what an app or website should look like.
But what does that mean?
Well, let me give an example:
Building a house, you first think of how to use the free space — where to carry out communications for electricity and water supply. Then, you decide how to place all these interior items you bought.
Once blueprints are ready, you get started with decorating rooms, choosing color palette, and doing other work. It works the same way in the world of digital design.
The keyword here is: Less is More!
Wireframes might look boring at first, but there is a reason behind it all. While wireframing we do not want to overload screens with styles, images and colors — rather we want to focus on structure to keep it simple.
It’s much easier to spot the project’s weak sides, pitfalls, and redundant functionality on this stage. You may want to add something new to improve the product or even change its logic entirely. All of these changes are easy to deal with during wireframing.
Blinkist
For this challenge I am using one of my favorite apps called BLINKIST, with the intention of reverse engineering it.
Blinkist is an app that provides summaries of over 3,000 bestselling non-fiction books, 15-minute reads, otherwise known as Blinks or book-in Blinks.
Basically, thick nonfiction books are now digestible summaries that take 15 minutes to listen, as opposed to days or weeks.
Wireframing
My intention is to start from the landing page of the app to the point of listening to a chosen Blink out of the many book categories given in the app.
The experience
‘’Easier said than done’’ is what I repeatedly thought in the beginning. Nevertheless, I kept experimenting and found new and easy ways to do certain things — VOILA and it became easier with each action.
Nailing down the basics before moving onto anything else is what this challenge definitely taught me. Wireframes are a crucial step in the design process. Everything is essential and important — even naming all of your layers one by one.
What I also really liked is that I can always go back and fine tune my work, which in turn gave me a peace of mind.
Now when I open any app on my phone, I automatically look at it through wireframing glasses and I can happily say that I have enjoyed this process very much.
