Tallymander 1.1 Available Today, Staff Favorite

Tallymander 1.1 is now available for download in the App Store.

Today one of the most thrilling, humbling and incredibly satisfying moments happened for me:

I’m at a loss for words.

Bank of America: Your iPhone App Sucks

Dear BofA:

I know you have a lot on your mind lately, what with your bank purchases and the whole of the finance industry falling apart. Still, I’d like to inspire your engineers to embark upon a simple, fun skunkworks project.

You may remember cashing in the iPhone App Store craze with your free BofA app this summer. You did promise to make it less ugly. You haven’t followed through yet.

Now, we’re all busy and I sympathize. Making a nice app is hard. So I did the hard part and designed a UI for you. It’s a gift. Repay me by implementing it and sparing us all the hideous orgy of Times New Roman that is your existing iPhone UI.

Remember, I’ve done the heavy lifting. This isn’t hard. You don’t even need to do it in Cocoa. You can keep using the WebKit display your app currently uses and implement my design in John Gruber’s “shit sandwich.”

Now, the existing home screen is okay.

It’s when we actually want to get down to some banking that things go downhill:

Wow. That’s a lot of Times. Ugly, small, hard to read. Fix it like this:

Next, let’s get logged in:

Blegh. Let’s get a tab bar going. Not just because tab bars are handy, which they are, but because making the user tap an area as tiny as those menu links is just cruel to iPhone users:

There we are. The tab buttons are much easier to strike with a fingertip — less time wasted by hitting the wrong selection. We’ll start the user at the accounts breakdown, since your balance is almost always the info you want first. Next, let’s check out account detail:

Painful. Let’s better group the transaction information and use some visual cues to explain individual entries:

Not so hard. You already use those icons for desktop online banking. Now let’s transfer funds:

Making the user step through multiple screens for a single task sucks, especially in 2008. Let’s streamline this:

Better! The user doesn’t lose track of what’s going on.

Nothing crazy, here, just some simple suggestions based on existing iPhone UI conventions. I hope this helps you guys.

I built these mockups using the excellent iPhone UI PSD file. The payroll information above is speculative. I do not work for Apple. Yet.