The Pad will be mightier than the pen

Posted on August 29, 2011

Last week was certainly an exciting week in the life of iDrills. The work that has been done on the app up to now behind the scenes has been well worth the wait to witness on screen. To see a functioning app in action certainly adds to the excitement of the whole project.

While i-Drills as a concept has been in my head for 15 months getting it into a working, functional app has taken a long, long time. From conceptual drawings to design and development it has taken hours and hours of work from many people.

While the pace of design and development can be somewhat frustrating, it would seem that time spent ruminating over little pieces of design will result in a far better user experience.

Born out of watching many coaches spend many hours creating training sessions and drills on pen and paper only for them to be tossed in the bin at the end of the day frustrated me. Good ideas are valuable resources were lost to the landfill every year. And this was often the case due to either a coach’s lack of confidence in relation to the computers or because of the lack of resources readily available to coaches. That is why from the outside I insisted on a user interface that was faster and more accurate than using a pencil or pen.

The user experience itself while not exactly unique will in the hands of an experience coach saved them so much time and you give them a much better resource than anything else currently available. The ability to create and consume content will be unique in this niche; most other applications either allow you to only create or only assume the content within.

While being given a video demonstration over Skype from Devon the UI certainly seems very slick and fast. It behaves exactly as I imagine it. And with those last few weeks of design and development to go, I am confident that iDrills will be a successful and addition to the coach’s armoury.