May 16, 2009

Recent YouVersion Projects

Christianity has always been a community experience—not just personal relationship.

With that in mind, LifeChurch.tv created YouVersion a few years ago, and I have been blessed to be a part of this project almost from the start. Fast forward to now, the team recently released YouVersion 2.0. Once again, I’m proud to have played a role in its release.

In case you don’t know, YouVersion is an online Bible site that allows readers to keep a personal journal or share public content with other users of YouVersion. Not only is it a great tool for Bible Study, YouVersion facilitates the worldwide Church community.

I wanted to share a couple of parts of the project that I worked on and know about.

The Early Wireframes

With most sites, the final design that you see is very different than the designers first rough drafts. I assisted with some of these initial design comps. This was before Chris Merritt was also pulled in to really make it come together and shine!

The YouVersion Blog

One piece of the site that I labored over was the site’s blog. The main idea was to keep it clean and focused. The purpose of the blog is to announce new features and offer ideas on how to best use the site. With that in mind, we stripped away the ability to leave comments. We also didn’t see a need for complex archiving. Simplicity was the goal with the YouVersion Blog:

The Mobile YouVersion Site

If you’re carrying an iPhone or Blackberry in your pocket or purse, you can disregard this one, because you should be using the YouVersion iPhone app that’s simply entitled “Bible” or the YouVersion Blackberry app. For the rest of us, if want to access the Bible from our mobile phone, then this version is for you. LifeChurch.tv asked me to redesign the basic mobile site. It was fun to do. This stripped down version is also served up to visitors using older versions of Windows Internet Explorer (ver. 6.0 and below). Simply go to m.youversion.com, and you’ll see this: