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by akavlie
4659 days ago
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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? |
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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.