To this day, Motion-X absolutely kills it with their "overblown" designs. This 2009 article is harping on an app that was dominant for the two years following its publication, and a design strategy that is still working for the company.
It's true that you can make an excellent UI using the standard components, and this also leads to other advantages like being able to adapt to new screen sizes easily. But to say Motion-X's UI somehow fails is a disproven hypothesis.
They went on to use the same kind of design approach for Motion-X GPS Drive, which let me check... yep, makes more money than Angry Birds in the US App Store, ringing in at 11th grossing app overall (not in the category, on the entire App Store).
Spot on, Smashing Magazine... you literally could not have picked a worse example. Maybe I should be quiet though, since we compete with them on some apps :)
How does the fact that the app sells well disprove the fact that the app is badly designed? I have both Motion-X apps, and I love their features, but I find myself using simpler apps because of the Motion-X UI clutter. Motion-X offers an impressive feature set for the price, but why on this earth do I have to deal with un-familiar graphical switches to change a setting? Where in the real, tangible world does having more switches and buttons make something better? I'd actually use the apps more than once if I didn't have to study the UI in order to make a task-related decision.
I never can figure out how to use the Motion-X apps. Tease me all you want, but the UI is a chore to me. I prefer the dumbed-down Tomtom app for navigation and the Nike GPS app for my runs. While they may lose, feature-wise, they win on functionality. Why should a user have to deal with artificial UI abstractions that add flair at the cost of increased cognitive load?
It's true that you can make an excellent UI using the standard components, and this also leads to other advantages like being able to adapt to new screen sizes easily. But to say Motion-X's UI somehow fails is a disproven hypothesis.
They went on to use the same kind of design approach for Motion-X GPS Drive, which let me check... yep, makes more money than Angry Birds in the US App Store, ringing in at 11th grossing app overall (not in the category, on the entire App Store).
Spot on, Smashing Magazine... you literally could not have picked a worse example. Maybe I should be quiet though, since we compete with them on some apps :)