Forepoint

Quality Control

We take quality very seriously at Forepoint, so much so we have a defined set of processes and quality control steps that must be followed with every project in order to ensure our work is of the highest quality. Our processes and quality control measures are accredited in the form of the International Standard ISO9001:2008 and have been all the way back to May 1994. In fact we believe we were the first company in our sector to have attained a quality control accreditation.

I am also very passionate about quality; I will often go in search of the best quality products and am prepared to pay that extra premium to get a higher quality product. This passion for quality also translates through to my work, where I find myself protecting our clients brand and image by producing high quality code for their website. I also continually search for new and innovative ways of developing websites to ensure my work is of the highest quality. So, when I find something which is of poor quality, be it at work or in my personal life, it really bugs me.

Apple iPhone 4

This aversion to poor quality was tested recently by the iPhone and an application I had downloaded. I am a huge Apple supporter and one of the reasons for this is their attention to quality and the finer details. Apple are a company who continually talk/boast about quality and the steps they take to ensure the quality of the products, so much so that it’s big news if anything ever contradicts this. For example, when it was suggested the new iPhone 4 lost signal when you held it in your left hand, it was all over the news, on the TV, in newspapers and on the Internet. You would have thought this was the first time such a problem had ever affected a mobile phone but is not, this problem has been plaguing mobile phones for years from the old Nokia’s and Sony Ericsson’s to other competing smart phones such as Google Nexus One. But because this is an Apple product it was big news and many people jump on this bandwagon and attempt to discredit Apple and their image of high quality.

Sarah Parmenter - Future of Web Design - By Aaron Walter

Another aspect which continues to grab media focus is the approval process Apple employs on its App Store. I often read technology blogs and there is not a week that goes by where I don’t read a story from a disgruntled app developer who has had their app rejected by Apple. This continuous stream of negativity against Apple’s approval process irritated me. Surely with Apple is rejecting apps that don’t meet their quality standards ensures all iPhone users have the consistently high user experience Apple is famous for. To find out more about these quality standards I attended a presentation by Sarah Parmenter at the Future of Web Design (FOWD) conference which Forepoint attended. Sarah is famed for her iPhone interface designs and as a result has a great understanding of the strict rules that must be adhered to. During Sarah’s presentation she highlighted several details from Apple’s extensive iPhone Interface Guidelines which showed the numerous considerations that had to be made when designing an iPhone interface. I left Sarah’s presentation with the conclusion that it must be a difficult task to get an app approved due to the sheer number of hoops Apple makes you jump through in order to maintain the quality of the user experience on the iPhone.

Apple App Store & Age Me App

However, I have recently begun to question this conclusion as a result of some apps I have downloaded and one in particular which was the inspiration behind this blog piece. I will often visit the most downloaded apps on the App Store as I tend to believe that if something is popular it must be good. At the top of the list was an app called ‘Age Me’. This was an application which was supposed to take a picture of yourself and age it so that you could see what you might look like when you get older. Silly idea I know but I was intrigued to see what I’d look like so I downloaded it. Needless to say the app doesn’t work at all and I am left pondering what I will look like in 30 years, but this was not my problem with the app. My problem lay with its interface, which looks like it was designed 30 years ago. It’s hard to use, there is no explanation of what to do, and the graphics and icons look as if they were design in Microsoft Paint by a two year old. When you compare this interface with the guidelines Sarah spoke about at FOWD I find it hard to understand how this app was ever approved, let alone why it’s at the top of the App store. This app is not alone, I have experienced several poorly designed apps which generally always come from the most downloaded section.

This really does lead me to question how difficult it is to get an app on the app store if apps as poor as this are approved and make their way to the top of the app store. It also begs the question, does Apple realise they themselves are effecting their own image of high quality user experiences by approving these poorly designed apps? Maybe Apple needs to take a look at some of the Forepoint quality control processes and implement them into their app approval process.