High Priest of App Design, at Home in Philly

PHILADELPHIA—More than 2,500 miles from Silicon Valley, in a small home office with a dog bed under the desk, sits a man on the cutting edge of the apps boom.

Loren Brichter isn't a household name. Nor are the mobile apps he has built, which include a Twitter client called Tweetie and a Boggle-like word game called Letterpress.

But to developers, the 28-year-old is a high priest of app design and an increasingly influential tastemaker.

Mr. Brichter was the first developer to create or help popularize app features such as pulling on a touch screen to refresh a page, panels that slide out from the side of a screen and the "cell swipe," which is swiping to uncover a list of hidden buttons.

Developer Loren Brichter says he is irked by apps that have menus that pop up or collapse on themselves because the interactions aren't real.

Those actions are now standard features in many popular apps, becoming part of the daily routines of millions of people. The "pull-to-refresh" feature, which Mr. Brichter built in 2009, is woven in software such as an app made by content-sharing site Pinterest Inc. and the mail app from Apple Inc. AAPL +2.52%

Evernote Corp. and Facebook Inc. FB -1.48% are also using a variant of Mr. Brichter's sliding-panel feature, which he built into in a Twitter Inc. iPad app he created during a stint at that company in 2010. The feature was also used by Research In Motion Ltd. BB.T -0.52% in its new BlackBerry operating system. And apps like Square Inc. have expanded on the swiping to reveal buttons with features like swiping to pay.

"It's hard to understate the impact his ideas have had on the space," says Phill Ryu, a developer who helped design the Clear task-management app, which uses variations on "pull-to-refresh" and has been downloaded more than 800,000 times.

Part of Mr. Brichter's appeal to developers is his accessibility.

When Dominique Leca wanted feedback on his Sparrow mail mobile app in 2010, he sought out Mr. Brichter. Mr. Brichter responded to Mr. Leca with copious notes about the Sparrow app, including suggesting an adjustment to Sparrow's text placement and advising Mr. Leca to "delay the fade-out animation by a second or so." Mr. Leca says he followed much of the advice and asked Mr. Brichter to be an adviser; Sparrow later received much acclaim and was acquired by Google Inc. GOOG -0.89% last year.

Mr. Brichter "has this ability to put himself in the shoes of a five-year-old who tells you in an elaborate language what he's having a hard time doing," says Mr. Leca, who now works at Google.

Mr. Brichter's reputation is growing as simplicity and design become more important in the highly competitive apps business. Influencers like Mr. Brichter—as well as former Apple designers Mike Matas, who is now at Facebook, and Bret Victor—thus draw big followings.

Their ideas often spread informally and rapidly. Rather than patenting and licensing their designs, developers ask each other permission to mimic an idea or do so on their own, sometimes using open-source technology.

Mr. Brichter filed to patent the "pull-to refresh" feature before joining Twitter, and the patent, expected to be issued soon, is now owned by Twitter. But he says there are ways to build this feature using open-source software, and he has long given anyone permission to use it "as long as they aren't a d---." Twitter lets the inventors of its patents veto using them in offensive lawsuits.

Mr. Brichter, whose design aesthetic is inspired by information theorists like Edward Tufte, a proponent of minimizing extraneous information in graphic designs, says he thinks up new features for apps based on how people move objects in the real world.

"Everything should come from somewhere and go somewhere," he says, adding that he's irked by apps that have menus that pop up or collapse on themselves because the interactions aren't real. "The most important thing is obviousness. The problem is overdesign."

Mr. Brichter, whose favorite apps include the weather app Dark Sky and calendar app Fantastical, says he has been surprised by how much his work has been picked up. "It is more neat than anything," he says.

Not everything he does has caught on. A gesture for wiping a menu off a screen in Letterpress hasn't gone anywhere, says Mr. Brichter, because he suspects it is buried in the app.

The son of a contractor and a restaurant owner, Mr. Brichter graduated from Tufts University with a degree in electrical engineering in 2006. He lives with his wife and two dogs, working from a small, tidy home office with a large Mac monitor and a framed chart of Tweetie's second version topping the app store revenue chart, a Christmas gift from his father. (The $2.99 app achieved the status in 2009 while making about $50,000 a day.)

Mr. Brichter also eschews conferences and networking gatherings, preferring Twitter and email. Short and fit, he is unassuming yet confident. His feedback and communication is direct, but sometimes tempered in email with a smiley face.

Mr. Brichter got his start in the mobile industry while at Apple from 2006 to 2007 as part of a five-person group working out early kinks in technology that made the iPhone's graphics hardware and software communicate. He left to work on his own projects and moved to Philadelphia to be close to his family. (He still doesn't release apps for Google's Android operating system because he thinks the hardware and software aren't as good as Apple's.)

In 2008, Mr. Brichter built Tweetie to have a better way to use Twitter and eventually included the "pull-to-refresh" feature. After selling the app to Twitter for what he says was "single digit millions" in 2010, he stayed on at Twitter working remotely on the company's apps for about a year and a half. He left to keep experimenting.

Mr. Brichter's latest app is the word game Letterpress, released late last year through his company, Atebits LLC. Letterpress is free but users pay $1.99 to play more than two games at once; Mr. Brichter says it has been downloaded millions of times.

He also built Letterpress with a new intent: independence from software owned by other companies. "I want to minimize my dependency on outside stuff," he says, adding he built his own graphics technology instead of using Apple's. He adds that he is working on an arcade game next that will also require him to build more of his own underlying technology.

Mr. Brichter's reputation has now spread to even teen developers. Ryan Orbuch, 16, recently pinged Mr. Brichter over Twitter for advice on his to-do list app, Finish.

"He definitely knows what he is doing," says Mr. Orbuch, who is working to incorporate Mr. Brichter's feedback, which ranged from "lose the colons" to fixing buttons that "shift a pixel when the flip animation finishes."

A 'Hamburger' Button?What's That?

App developers are making their software ever-easier to use. Here is a glossary of some increasingly common features you might recognize from your favorite apps.

'Hamburger Buttons'

Description: The buttons—which have three overlaying fat lines, supposedly representing buns and filling—are often pressed to release a sliding pane from the side of the screen. Music service Spotify uses the feature to reveal search and playlist menus. Social network Path uses a hamburger button to reveal notifications of actions friends have taken on some content.

'Swipe'

Description: Familiar to iPhone users who swipe to unlock their device, this feature is cropping up everywhere from swiping to pay for something in payment service Square to swiping to delete an email in Mailbox, a new email management app.

'Edge Gesture'

Description: This refers to swiping from the edge of, or off the edge of, a screen. In the iPhone, doing so pulls down a screen with information like the weather and calendar items.

'Pull to Refresh'

Description: The feature does what its name says, refreshing a screen when you drag and release your finger. It is hard to find an app that refreshes that doesn't use it these days. Twitter and LinkedIn are good examples.