Desktop application interface design!

Flow

Hello everyone,

We're Vitesse Digital, an agency connecting clients with suppliers of offshore development services. However, today we're not talking about offshoring!

We've been building a software product (desktop application NOT website / webapp), which now is in such a state as to warrant presentation. Before we do this however, we need a new interface which looks good!

A bit about the application:

As mentioned, this application is a desktop application, not a website / webapplication. The application is for now called “Flow”, which is derived from a mental state, in which people experience a highly focused and thus productive state of mind.

In essence, Flow is a hotkey application, with two purposes: One is to act as a “launcher” application, such as “Launchy”, “Enzo”, “Dash” and similar. A launcher application is used for quickly accessing files, folders, urls, applications etc.

The second, and more advanced purpose, is to provide hotkeys for specific applications. Any command, which can be launched in an application, can be launched through Flow.

The target audience of the application is "business users". This includes shipping agents, support agents, accountants, terminal operators, regular office workers, designers and more.

Basically our tool caters to a lot of different users, so the interface should not be too tailored to any specific target audience.

Please have a look at the attached file, it contains a more thorough design brief, complete with screenshots of the application. In addition, it contains PSD's for our current logo and more. The brief is rather large, but with a lot of screenshots of the existing interface.

Excerpt from the design brief document:

"We have build a prototype of Flow, which will be presented shortly to certain groups of individuals. For this, we need to have an interface frontend designed. Basically, the entire interface is more or less designed, meaning we have the layout pretty much sorted. We do not, however, have a visually appealing interface. It is very functional, but it is not looking good.
Thus the designer is a bit limited, in the terms of the layout already being designed. We have spend a lot of time designing the usability of the application, so this should not be changed. Only the actual look and feel of the application, should be designed.

We are big fans of the simple is better / less is more philosophy, which goes to show in the current interface design. We feel application interfaces need to present the absolute minimum amount of options to a user, with as little possible distractions as possible. "

If this sounds interesting, we would love to see your submission! Good luck.