"Users will notice" a second tap? You're kidding, right? That's a completely new gesture without any affordance. Maybe a long-press or 3D touch (depending on device) to trigger going deeper makes a bit of sense but it it is still invisible.

Even worse, apply the jostled on a bus scenario. Now someone who accidentally stuttered on the button is in a menu they don't recognise without realising how they got there.

Mike, is there any code generation? I would expect that from the makers of Paintcode but you didn't mention it. Especially for animation, anything that lacks code is a non-starter in 2019.

I read and clip case studies into Evernote. That gives me a persistent local copy to which I can save local links as I also 1) write commentary on them and 2) use them in design decision documents. They help inform my product design more than "how to" articles because they usually offer more explanation of WHY. One of the very best I've read this year https://www.uxfol.io/project/04f7271c/Add-a-Feature--Setting-the-conversation-level-with-your-Uber-driver

Firstly, is there a QA or support department and/or issue tracking system?

Those people can be your lifesavers and champions. In most companies they are under-respected and often not heard. Support in particular will have the best feel for what confuses users in the current product. Start with their stories.

As a startup, they may not have an organised support department, so ask who has been doing support?

Jan, I come from a developer perspective (35 years) and I'm crazy in love with Supernova Studio because it backs up what you do in design with full code generation. (I also have a long pedigree in code-gen having worked on the two dominant products in Classic MacOS days).

I have long despaired about how the tooling world was ever-focused on products which only got as far as generating image assets and sometimes videos for hand-over but had no brakes to bring them back to reality. Obviously, a skilled dev team can build anything but the budget often doesn't allow for it.

Supernova Studio requires you start in Sketch and their one weak point at this time is re-importing a single screen loses some details, but it's a team that moves very fast so any criticism you read needs to be current.

After importing static screens from Sketch you then set properties, add animation, prototyping links between pages and generate full working native code or React Native apps.

Because it's constraining your work to the needs of the code generator, it's like having a developer by your side continuously. They also have a cloud product for sharing designs and reviewing.

Two other products worth looking at if you're just prototyping animations but want working output:

1. Haiku generates Lottie files and code so you can have mobile animation, but also has website output with more control, integrated with major JS frameworks. It's a competitor for After Effects.
2. Flow takes two Sketch artboards and generates the animation between them automatically, then lets you fiddle with it. It generates only Swift code for iOS apps at present but has a flexible generation system that's template driven.

Brian, did you include Supernova Studio in your "major interaction tools"?

Something worth highlighting is their tutorial walkthrough https://medium.com/@appsupernova/introducing-spacebook-dfdfbc9ea943 which is worth studying just as a good example of how to do nice feature-sized tutorials.

Is the code generator user-extensible? I used to use AppMaker back in Classic Mac days and was able to add an entire Windows Desktop app generator due to its flexibility (producing MFC with C++). The missing piece I am interested in is Xamarin Forms.