A Better Way App

Apex had a reputation in the industry for creating innovative marketing approaches and tech-driven customer experiences. In the early days we had a non-linear application built for the desktop. Over the years, we took what we learned about interaction and started to build more captivating presentations for the iPad. But, in 2014 we decided to take what we had learned about immersion and created an entirely new presentation called “A Better Way;” with a primary focus on interactivity. I created a UI concept for the Home Screen that we later dubbed the “Cinematic User Interface,” where instead of using icons to enter each section of the presentation, the user could simply touch on an object in the scene to jump to that module. This allowed us to create an entire world where customers could take a hot air balloon journey to explore our company, products, and services in a more immersive way.

The cinematic user interface has been a staple of the ABW app over the years. The original version below had a more simplified geometry, with an almost paper-like quality to the shader materials. The refreshed 2019 release was updated to include more photo-realistic textures and lighting that were inspired by those found in some of Maxfield Parrish’s greatest works.

Here are some early wireframe concepts I created for the ABW application back in 2014. Here, I was trying to workout some of the user flows, the basic page elements and some of the key points of interaction.