Three looks, never a blank canvas

The sixth of Quiny's eight questions is "what should it look like?" and it is the only one with no text field. You see three finished directions and you tap one. This post is about why.

Theme editors are for designers

Every app builder we studied handles look and feel the same way: a panel of color pickers, a font dropdown, a corner radius slider. It gives a designer everything and gives a shop owner a headache. People would spend twenty minutes choosing a blue and end up with something that looked like nothing they would have chosen from a shelf.

The truth is that most small business owners know exactly what they like when they see it, and cannot describe it in advance. So we stopped asking them to.

Where the three come from

Before the sixth question Quiny has already read your links, your product photos and, if you gave it one, your Instagram. From those it works out a palette, a type feeling and a mood. For Glowhaus, the skincare shop we use as an example everywhere, that meant sand and sage tones from the packaging, generous spacing from the photographs, and a wordmark with wide letterspacing lifted from the labels.

Then it builds three directions that all use those facts differently:

• Minimal, editorial. Lots of space, quiet type, products doing the talking.
• Bold, high contrast. Big type, strong buttons, the same palette pushed further.
• Soft, organic. Rounder shapes, warmer tones, gentler hierarchy.

Each one is a real screen, your real products, your real prices. Not a swatch. When she tapped the bold one, every other screen followed it.

What never changes between them

Your content. The three directions differ in type, color, spacing and shape, and in nothing else. Prices do not move. Product names do not get rewritten. The reorder button she asked for is in all three. This is the reason we can show three finished screens in a few seconds: the hard thinking happened in the first five questions, and the look is applied on top.

Changing your mind

Choosing a direction is free and switching later is possible. Switching after screens have been built is the one expensive thing in Quiny, because every screen is rebuilt, and the console tells you the cost before you confirm. In practice few people switch, and almost all who do change their mind before the third screen.

Why not more than three

We tested five. Choice went up and confidence went down. People tapped between them, asked us to combine two, and took three times as long. Three is enough to feel like a choice and few enough to make one.