Quixey Web UI Design

Quixey

Quixey is an all-platform app directory and functional search engine. Quixey's search finds the best app that does the function you want.

Quixey works by building millions of "function pages" for all the things people want to do with apps. Some examples of "functions" are:

"take notes"
"broadcast live streaming video"
"make free phone calls"
"make a photo black and white"
"red eye correction"
"remote control for watching hulu"

Each of these functions gets its own function page, which lists the most useful apps for that function.

Imagine you want to find the best app for editing photos on your laptop or iPhone. So you simply go to the Quixey home page and search for "edit photos". Quixey's search algorithms know that if an app is ranked highly on function pages like "make a photo black and white" and "red eye correction", then it's a good match for what you're trying to do.

Quixey is a powerful new way to navigate the growing universe of apps. Whether your platform is web, desktop, mobile, Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, or one of thousands of others, it will find an app that does what you want.

Everyone has wants that can be satisfied by finding the right app. Quixey is for everyone.

We have built the Quixey functionality, and now we need a clean and simple UI design.

Quixey must look like a modern interactive AJAX web application -- clean, simple, and easy to navigate.

A user will often have to skim multiple pages of text and data to decide which app to get. The Quixey UI needs to make it very easy to navigate around and skim things.

As long as you understand these requirements, you have the freedom to make big design choices about the site as a whole.

5

The pages we need are:

1. Home Page
2. App Page
3. Function Page
4. App-Function Guides Page
5. Search Result Page

Please see the attached Word document or PDF for the full design specification.

People love the feeling of empowerment that comes with busting out a simple, powerful tool. That's what we're aiming for with Quixey: We want the user to feel empowered because of the ease of the app-finding experience.

We think the Most Important Guideline (MIG) for a good UI is...
===================================================
The user should understand 90% of what they're looking at.
===================================================
So, there might be a few little links they haven't understood yet, but in general the user should know exactly what all the page elements are there for.

We think these sites look good and follow the MIG very well:

+ http://twitter.com
+ http://meebo.com
+ http://aviary.com
+ http://tungle.me
+ http://tumblr.com
+ http://apple.com
+ http://formspring.me

In contrast, here are some sites that suffer because they don't follow the MIG, even though they are still well-designed in other ways:

- http://appolicious.com
- http://brizzly.com
- http://microsoft.com