I had written about the Evolution of UI of ApartmentAdda in March 2009 how the design evolved over the last 2 years.
We launched ApartmentAdda with the following UI designed by Cicada Media on Nov 12, 2008. It was a simple yet highly functional UI. Also it has got burnt into my retina – seeing it so many times a day 🙂
Somewhere down the line we realised it was time to give the site an upgrade. We kicked off the site redesign process with Leafgrafica in August. After a lot of designs and meetings ( and corner house’s death by chocolate which was close by) – the following design won our hearts and mind.
I would like to thank both Cicada Media and Leafgrafica teams for having designed these beautiful sites ( and having put up with creativity stifling requirements from us 🙂 )
This is a post I wanted to write for a long time. Here are some screenshots of how
Apartment Adda looked at different stages.
October 2007 : I spent a weekend creating a prototype of Apartment Adda. Got an open source web design template from
owsd.org and was able to quickly create a working site.
We had one goal for our UI to begin with. When a user logs in he need not click on different pages to see what is happening in his or her Adda. In one click he should get to see all the updates and also get a bird’s eye view of everything – without getting flooded with information.
We finally came up with a dashboard design that will show the latest updates in nice little widgets – where each widget will act like a summary page for the detailed page.
After this prototype was done we used this to brain storm about Apartment Adda and flush out the stories.
Around September 2008 when I started full time development on Apartment Adda, I got one more template from oswd.org. Decided to go with Php and this is how the UI looked like.
Home Page :
While I was developing the site, simultaneously we got the help of a UI design firm –
Cicada Media, Bangalore. Mr. Binil designed the vibrant Apartment Adda logo and Mr.Balaji designed the style sheets, buttons and layout. Many thanks to Cicada team for the UI upgrade of Apartment Adda !!
Here is how Apartment Adda looks as of today.
HomePage :
Resident’s Dashboard :
Admin’s Dashboard :
Here is the life story of a speck
