Designing my own iOS brew app. Give me your feedback on this hop screen

Hi Everyone,

As a fun project I've been building my own brew app for iOS. The primary feature set right now is recipe design.

My primary reason for building my own app is that I find that most of the iOS brewing apps out there have fairly clunky user interfaces that feel like they're designed for a desktop rather than a mobile phone. I also feel like there's a lot crammed into the limited real estate that is available on phones. My hope is to provide an app with a limited, but useful feature set so that we can tweak our recipes while we're outside brewing or running around buying stuff at the LHBS.

I'd love to hear what you think about these user interface (UI) mock ups.

Please let me know
1) Do you know what the stuff on the screen means?
2) What is missing?
3) What was done well? (This isn't for my ego, its so I know what *not* to change in the future)
4) Your reaction in general (like it? hate it? needs X in order to be useful, etc)

I apologize in advance for the enormous images; I'm in a bit of a rush.

Thanks for the feedback!

PS. If you're an iOS developer and are interested in helping out send me a PM. I can also use help from anyone that has an artistic touch and has a taste for clean, simple aesthetic.

Here's what the hops additions screen could look like.
Do you prefer A, B, or C?




Here's what the main screen for a recipe could look like.


Here's how you adjust the malts


You can change what data is displayed at the top so that you can see how your recipe is coming together.




And here's the color and malt %s:

Nice, that looks great. I think I prefer option B with the actual times rather than the graphical representation of times. As far as suggestions, do you allow metric measurements? Another thing that might be nice, say you had a few hops that were all 10 minute additions. It'd be nice if they were visually grouped together...maybe with a different shading. For example, the 60 min addition would be shaded light green, and the 10 minute addition would be grouped together with light yellow shading. That way it's easy to see that hops X,Y and Z have to be added at the same time.

Thanks for the reply microbusbrewery. Great suggestions.

Out of curiosity, do you use metric for everything (water volume, grain weight, and hop weight) or do you use it just for hops. I'm wondering if it makes sense to add one global metric switch that applies to all units, or if it would be better to allow turning on metric for specific settings.

I like the grouping suggestion on the hops by time. I'll look into doing that. I think it is technically pretty easy to do. The one thing I think I'll have to figure out is what to do when the user is adjusting the time. Would the row move as soon as they select a new time, or would it move when they're done editing the boil time. I'm thinking probably the latter as the former would be a bit jarring.

Thanks again for the feedback.

I tend to use metric for hops only. My original scale only had accuracy down to the whole gram so I found it more accurate to measure them in grams rather than ounces. So I'd vote for being able to set it for individual ingredient type (e.g. grain, water, hops).

Yeah, I think the latter as well (changing when they're done editing).