Gizmodo has taken a look at VoiceCentral and we appreciate the kind words and honest feedback. In his VoiceCentral review Jason Chen fairly noted that the user interface (UI) could stand some improvement, so we just wanted to take a moment and expand on what caused the current design. For our app, this is most noticeable on the keypad layout and also has a minor impact on several of the other buttons.

First off, we understand UIs are completely subjective. Some people love the way the keypad looks, others don’t. It’s never going to be perfect for everyone, but that won’t stop us from trying!

In our first cut, we mimicked the exact look and feel of the native iPhone keypad. Apple tends to want you to conform to their design superiority and so like diligent partners we thought we did just that. One problem: our first submission of VoiceCentral seemed to be rejected because we did it too well. Apple implied in their rejection that our interface looking too much like theirs would create user confusion.

We were then faced with what seemed to be conflicting directives, i.e. follow the Apple User Interface Guidelines in some cases but not in others. We say “seemed” a lot around here because the responses from Apple are notoriously vague. (Side note: the whole process of review, rejection, and resubmission is really broken. But that’s been much publicized already and is at best a topic for another post). We decided that in order to get through the submission process, we would do something radically different and make darn sure there was no confusion with the native Apple UI. We always planned on revisiting the UI once we got through that process and started on the next build.

Now that we’ve been accepted, we are actively working on the next build of VoiceCentral and we have some really great feature ideas for the upcoming releases. We anticipate providing a cleaner keypad soon and are also including many suggestions from our users. We really appreciate all the feedback we’ve gotten and we welcome any and all suggestions from our user base. We track every single suggestion for possible inclusion in future releases. We are eager to help, so please contact us for issues, thoughts, or just to say Hi.

And now you know why our app looks the way it does. For the less than stable reviewer in the store, please don’t let our little app be the cause of such violence.