- The video is a mobile app review with a focus on design
- The first app reviewed is Pearls, a medical reference app
- The reviewer praises the app's use of native navigation and ease of searching for drug information
- Some suggestions for improvement include making text and icons more legible and ensuring all elements are thumb-sized for easy tapping
- The second app reviewed is BlueDot, an app for finding EV charging stations
- The reviewer likes the app's map feature but suggests improving the color selection and providing clearer call-to-action buttons
- They also recommend user testing and incorporating feedback to enhance the app's usability and design.

- The video discusses three different apps: Duffle, Bold Voice, and EdenCare.
- The hosts provide feedback on the design and functionality of each app.
- They suggest simplifying the interface of Duffle and making categories more obvious.
- The hosts also mention that the onboarding process of Bold Voice could be streamlined.
- They notice that EdenCare may be a web app rather than a native app due to certain design elements.
- Overall, the hosts provide constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement for each app.

- The app being reviewed is focused on health and wellness.
- The reviewer suggests that the app should be primarily online and not a native app.
- The "Find Care" section of the app is criticized for being a work in progress and not user-friendly.
- The app is described as information-dense and overwhelming with too much text.
- The reviewer suggests that the app feels more like a website than an app and lacks interactive functionality.
- The focus of the app seems to be on telemedicine and helping users take actions.
- The reviewer suggests that the app needs more actions available to the user and should respond immediately to user input.
- The potential of the app is acknowledged, but it is suggested that more actions should be embedded in the app to make it easier for users to get the care they need.

- The video reviews several mobile apps, including Pearls, BlueDot, Duffle, Bold Voice, and EdenCare.
- The reviewer provides feedback on the design and functionality of each app, suggesting improvements for legibility, navigation, color selection, call-to-action buttons, and interface simplification.
- The reviewer also criticizes the "Find Care" section of the health and wellness app for being user-unfriendly and overwhelming with excessive text.
- The app is described as lacking interactive functionality and feeling more like a website than an app.
- The reviewer suggests incorporating more actions and immediate response to user input to make it easier for users to access care.

In the crowded field of mobile apps, design can be just as important as the software. But what makes for a well designed app? In this episode of Design Review our host Aaron Epstein is joined by David Siegel, founder and CEO of the no-code app builder Glide (https://www.glideapps.com/) to critique five startup apps. Together they’ll highlight dos and don’ts for creating a great looking, functional mobile app that’ll stand out from the pack. 

Thanks to the YC startups featured in this episode: Pyrls, Bluedot, Duffl, BoldVoice, and EdenCare. 

If you would like to have your startup's website or app reviewed on a future episode of Design Review, please submit your info here: https://shorturl.at/wIJS0 

Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ 
Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 
00:00 - Intro: Mobile App Review
00:34 - What Glide Does?
01:07 - How to Design a Well-Designed Mobile App
01:39 - Pyrls: A Modern Medical Reference App
05:43 - Bluedot: Finding EV Charging Stations
10:03 - Duffl: Quick Snack Delivery for College Students
15:12 - BoldVoice: Hollywood Coaches and AI Feedback to Improve English
18:59 - Eden Care: Group Healthcare in Africa
23:37 - Outro

So after many requests, we are finally going to be doing a mobile app review.

We're going to run through them, we're going to figure out what feedback we have, what's working well, and hopefully help you for all the mobile apps that you're designing out there.

So welcome to another episode of Design Review.

All right, so today we are very lucky to be joined by David Siegel, the co-founder of Glide, which came out of the YC Winter 2019 batch.

Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about what Glide does and your experience designing mobile apps.

Glide's a no-code tool that allows businesses to create custom software.

When we think of apps that we use every day, the code is essential to make them function.

But apps, companies are hugely differentiated by their ability to execute on design.

And when we started Glide, we just were aware of this imbalance.

We saw so many well implemented pieces of software that just lacked the design component.

What tips do you have high level for what makes up a well-designed mobile app?

Well, the first tip is you want to stick to the standards of the platform that you're running on.

Another important consideration is the context in which your users use your app.

You want to think about physically, what is the environment the person is in?

After those 2, it's basically just all the normal background design principles.

Is the text legible, enough contrast, you know, the basics.

So I'm really excited to dig into these apps and see how well they execute on design.

All right, so first up we have Pearls, which is a modern medical reference app for healthcare providers.

That's the first design that we're considering is the design of the name.

The words that make up your app and even the name of the app is part of the design.

So it's hard to think of a name with the domain that's available.

We'll get over Perls, but it did cause us to second guess ourselves.

All right, so right out of the gate, we're in the app.

It looks like we got a bunch of different cards here.

This looks like it's going with this paradigm of having lots of different sections going down the page.

Let's get that Pearl CTA at the bottom middle.

That seems like the most important thing on the screen.

This is an app for searching drug information.

1 thing that I'm noticing is there's a lot of little screenshots in each of these cards, which are too small for me to actually figure out what's happening here.

So it did use the native navigation, pushing into the detail page.

And you can see in this list, everything is thumb sized.

On mobile, everything should be nicely tappable with your thumb, which means it usually needs to be larger than 60 pixels square.

You can see there's kind of a violation of that on the star rating control at the bottom.

That's a little bit itty-bitty for your fingers.

Yeah, my thumb covers the entire thing when I put it over it, so it's kind of hard to tell where you're tapping.

So that actually wasn't obvious to me that this would expand inline.

Usually, you'd see a disclosure triangle, like a little down arrow or right side arrow or something like that to reference the fact that it would expand.

The animation is also, it happened quickly, but it does animate.

Animation, when you need to change the shape of something or the content on the screen, animation can help people follow the thread of what's happening instead of doing a hard cut.

OK, so we're into a database, different links.

Overall, I'm feeling, if I'm in health care and I'm using this app, I'm feeling I'm using something that's contemporary and smooth.

If this is a reference app, they're probably trying to look up some information to answer a question.

So let's look at the standard dosage of finasteride.

Yeah, the search brought it right to the top.

look, I spelled it wrong and it still found it.

And it's got the search in line in real time.

Because otherwise it would have spelled it wrong, I would have hit the button, it would have told me no results.

So right out of the gate, I can figure it out.

So we have a very novel interaction right here.

It looks like it's kind of optimized for quickly tapping and reachable by your thumb.

I'm not sure what's going to happen when I tap on any of these.

We just have the main indications, pharmacology, etc.

It opens the web browser in line, which is great, rather than taking you outside of the app.

I think there's maybe a few things that they could do here to make these more legible at this overview dashboard screen.

But it seems like this is a very thought out app.

It raises the bar on what people in this industry usually have access to.

From my passing familiarity with it, I think it's a great design.

Next up, we have BlueDot, which is an app to find, pay, and access EV charging stations.

So we launched right to a map showing where we are and the nearby charging stations.

Yeah, if I'm looking to find EV charging stations, then you get me right to the aha moment, the thing that I'm looking for right out of the gate.

So, I guess we're driving around right now in our EV.

I wish we'd known that before we tapped on the icon.

If only there was a way for them to show that.

Okay, let's just get out of this neighborhood.

1, it'd be nice to know which ones are available on the map.

This might cause someone to leave the app and not return if they tap on 7 things and they don't get anywhere.

But I think it'd be interesting, we could critique the visual design of this app.

I would recommend some more care in the color selection.

Also, the name of the app has the word blue in it, but the logo looks green.

So I would recommend if you're going to put a color name in your company's name or your product's name, your main color for your brand should probably be that color and not a different 1.

So maybe change these icons to reflect the availability.

And I would also even just remove the logo.

I don't think you need your company's logo on your main screen.

You've already got the customer in the door.

Yeah, otherwise we're left here just tapping.

Yeah, I think start charging or I don't know.

I'm not sure what the next thing we need is.

Do we need to map it, or do we want to paste our charging?

Whatever it is, though, it was missing actually a call to action right here until I expanded it.

And so, OK, so if I'm going to route to there, and so they're taking me out of the app.

So this is probably an advanced feature that may take some time to build, but to the extent they can keep this in the app, then I think it would actually help them a lot.

early stage company, you probably don't want to implement in-app navigation yet.

You can see again the sort of basic colors that are used here.

Start charging, it's very clear that that's the main CTA, but it's using the same color as the route button, which is a little bit confusing.

If route is the secondary action on the screen, I might give it a neutral gray color.

Again, you don't want to get too caught up with colors.

They're kind of the icing on the design cake, but they're a quick win.

Well, I guess 1 of the important things to think about here is, what is the next step that somebody wants to take?

Next step is we're probably going to want to map to it if we're not familiar with where exactly we're going or where exactly it's located.

The flow now is we're going to another app.

And so once I get there, then I think I got to come back into the app to then hit the start charging button in order to actually start charging.

So that's a little bit of a complicated flow.

I would say maybe Blue Dot has done this.

But just getting in the car with 1 potential customer and putting your app on their phone and mounting it on their dashboard and just running through the situation would reveal a lot of these small things that you could do to improve.

So if you are building a mobile app, just get it into users' hands as quickly as possible and ask them to use it and just write down where they trip up.

Overall, it's a nice interaction to quickly jump in and find stations nearby.

We'd love to see which ones are more available than others.

And a little bit of user testing and some color theory could go a long way to make this app really shine.

All right, next app we're going to take a look at is Duffle, which is quick snack delivery for college students on college campuses.

All right, what are we seeing here, David?

Well, I'm hungry and I need some quick snacks because I'm a college student.

The pictures of the food, a little small.

If you're going to do just a two-column layout and you're showing hungry people sugar and carbohydrates that they can buy.

You want to make them a little bit bigger.

The plus, it's kind of just getting lost in the composition, but it looks like a fun app.

There's this weird sidebar down the side with emoji.

If I need a kiwi or a ramen, I can just get it in 1 tap.

Yeah, I've never really seen a UI like this with, like I've seen it with the letters, right?

Like in the Contacts app, where it has all the letters that you can quickly scroll to.

I haven't really seen that as images before.

If your app is for college students who are slamming Red Bulls and working all night, you can totally get away with a more eccentric and fun design.

This is interesting because these sections seem pretty long.

You have to scroll pretty far, which I guess is why they added this UI on the right-hand side to be able to quickly get somewhere.

Let's get 2 Red Bulls and 2 ramens and a Swedish fish.

If you have a call to action that shows a preview of some content, like the food that you're about to order, when you tap on that, you really want the user to see the thing they just tapped on.

It's very disorienting to tap on something to get it and not get it.

All right, I'm doing the plus on Red Bull.

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Critiquing Startup Mobile Apps with Glide CEO