With 1,00,000 downloads in May 2023 alone, Savage Interactive’s Procreate has firmly cemented its presence as one of the top iPad apps for illustration. Its interface is clean, packed with intuitive gestures, integrated seamlessly with the Apple pencil, all packaged in one neat app all the way from Tasmania.

Several countries and a decade away, I, in a team with two batchmates, was tasked with doing a study of this efficient app as our first foray into UI/UX Design.

We started out by creating a sitemap, cataloging the many buttons, settings and options within Procreate, and how they interlinked back and forth.

Here’s a link to it

Being complete beginners, we gradually began to share more and more incredulous looks with each other as the map went on and on, as we started to realize just how many features and settings were neatly tucked away within this seemingly simple workspace.

We then worked on a style guide for the app, breaking it down into its colours, fonts, and shapes. Since we didn’t have direct access to Procreate’s icons, and it wasn’t the main goal of the exercise, we simply collected icons to use.

I then worked on tabulating a User’s experience as they set out on a journey across the app. I took the profile of a frequent Procreate user, comfortable with digital formatting, as they opened the app and exported an image to Instagram.

Which leads us right into -

The Bad

Pain Points -

• The features normally present when posting from the Instagram app (like filters, switching account, hashtag popularity, suggestions, and so on) are not present when exporting from Procreate
• The alternative method-saving the image to gallery and posting it from the Instagram app, greatly increases the number of taps and task switching a user has to perform.

I expanded my scope and started looking at the iOS Share sheet as a whole. A similar issue exists when exporting to Google Drive — the ‘Shared With Me’ section of folders is entirely missing, and within the folders you can export to, the user goes through several rounds of scrolling, looking for their folder, looking for the right sub folder, and so on. Need to share files back and forth quickly into a team drive folder? You’d still have to search for it manually each time.

Having identified these problem areas, I cornered the opportunities I could work on -

• A preset feature that exports to user-selected paths, that can be saved and reused
• A more customized experience
• Ability to select multiple avenues of export at the same time

The next phase of this exercise — making low fidelity wireframes — send me right into the phase of -

The Ugly

It’s a well accepted fact that the first few ideas you brainstorm are the weakest. With this being my first time designing UI UX, as someone who really likes to fill up a canvas, my iterations had a lot of sections, lot of apps being displayed, and some awkwardly placed shapes. I’d never really liked how the share sheet makes you swipe for a while to find the app you want, and wondered why they didn’t just show all the options in one go, but now I could appreciate how it maintains Apple’s visual language. Between examining the neat component of iOS and staring for rather too long at each curve of each button in Procreate’s streamlined interface, I was realizing how the placement of each pixel sends you a message without you noticing it.

Over this short case study, I felt like my eyes were opened to the subtle but powerful design that goes into every app I interact with. I had to unlearn and relearn how to look at a process — sometimes we get so used to sidestepping a problem, we forget it’s there, and it’s important to take a step back and focus on finding those snags in your path.

The aim of this exercise was to put a whole new direction of thought into motion, and I owe a big thank you to Rayna Batavia, for being a patient and thought provoking guide throughout the process. Credits also to Jigyasa G and @Ayush for their combined efforts on this case study.