[potatolicious]

Most of these are probably. There's another blog out there covering iOS7 redesigns, but most of them aren't actually from the companies/apps in question, but rather spec redesigns by third parties.

In any case, Kicksend is the only app there that strikes me as having problems with stock photography. The other apps that features photography: TeeVee and that blog reader app, strike me as non-problems, since they are in every position to use curated, professional photography everywhere.

But yeah, I really hate it when social networking/sharing apps use stock photography in their designs - these screenshots look nothing like what their typical user will see. Build your design around shitty phone photographs (or help your users take less shit photos).

Also, in my admittedly not-very-important opinion, both AboutMe and TigerLily Lane's designs are terrible and violate a truckload of very core iOS7 (or really just modern mobile design) philosophies.

AroundMe uses the dreaded "internal homescreen", which was a fad that came and went during Facebook's v1 application back in 2008. Tile-homescreens within apps are confusing and do not read naturally, they also are indicative of extreme kitchen-sink design that hasn't been fully thought through. It's a crappy response to having an app that does too much stuff in completely unrelated ways. The linear list they have in their iPad design is much better.

TigerLily Lane gets much worse though. Lots of drop shadows where iOS7 deliberately avoids them. Lots of boxed components instead of iOS7's standard of full-bleed to the edges. Lots of completely ignoring stock components/design in exchange for their own invention of the same thing - e.g. the size selector, where the user has to learn a completely new segmented control instead of using something that is (or looks/feels like) the stock segmented control.

Lots of violation of new iOS7 button conventions. Icon buttons are conventionally surrounded by a circle to indicate tappability, they are never filled with a color except in their "down" state. All of their icon buttons violate this.

And their home screen has nothing that implies tappability on the username/password fields. The least they could've done was separate those two visually so it looks like each is tappable.

I love the PerfectWeather design though - IMO it's got the right mix of iOS7-convention-following without going straight off the flatten-everything deep end.

Overall if this is indicative of iOS7 design in general, we've got a long way to go.

[chavesn]

Good points, a lot to think about. And I do agree it seems like there is a long way to go before we are seeing many great apps in iOS 7 design language.

Original iOS may feel bland now, but I feel like the design language that it created bred extremely usable apps at a far higher rate than any other OS before it. I can't say that I see the same happening with iOS 7. The foundation just doesn't seem to inspire great design as easily. In the hands of great designers, we'll be fine. But let's be honest, the vast majority of all apps and even a large portion of those we use daily are not created by great designers (or are held down by corporate interests).

[akavlie]

I'm curious about your objection to the internal homescreen approach. You're saying that showing disparate functions in a tiled layout is bad, but a linear list layout is good? I don't really follow why that's the case.

Has there been any discussion of downsides of the internal homescreen approach by professional designers that you know of?

[potatolicious]

I've chatted with some professional designers about exactly this and the opinions have been pretty consistent - they dislike/hate the internal homescreen.

There are a bunch of issues I've seen raised (and I agree with):

- It's hard to parse. We read left/right (or right/left as the language goes), or top/down. We don't read in zigzag easily. A tiled layout makes parsing a list of items difficult. This is, at the end of the day though, a fairly minor complaint compared to the rest.

- It gives unimportant features equal prominence to your primary features. This is, IMO, the biggest knock against using this UI. When Facebook used the internal homescreen (once upon a time) the "Notes" feature was given equal prominence to "News Feed", which seems pure silliness. When Yelp used it, the "My Account" feature was equal in prominence to "Search" and "Nearby". This happens because in almost all cases where internal homescreens are used it's because the devs can't find a better way to communicate the apps different features to the user, so the solution is to bundle it all up into a bunch of tiles and let the user deal with it.

- It encourages a high degree of modality. You launch into into this massive 9-way fork in the road, and this encourages deep UIs where it's difficult to move between the different branches without backing all the way back up to the root. The original Facebook app suffered terribly from this. The trend in recent years has been a move towards flatter, more laterally traversible UIs. See for example the Facebook Chat Heads - where messaging is embedded throughout the app without making it modal. The ubiquitous side-menu that's almost universal in iOS today is a slightly less elegant solution to the same - though in the slide-menu's defense, it's less disruptive than taking over your whole screen.

- It's user friction you didn't have to incur. If I launch into Facebook it's a pretty safe assumption I'm checking my news feed. You can also contextually very easily determine what I want to do - if I have outstanding unread messages received recently, take me to messaging. Don't make the user choose if you have a high degree of confidence about what the user is looking for. A good example of this done well is, IMO, Ness - instead of asking you for cuisines or price ranges to execute a search, it does a default search based on smart defaults (which takes into account your last search, as well as time of day and other factors), and gives you easily tools to tweak the results to what you really want. A homescreen says "I have no idea what you want, so here's everything". Imagine going to Google.com and getting dropped in a large list of everything Google does.