Flock Blog

Hello once again Flockstars,

One of the interesting things in trying to design a user experience in an open source environment is the balance between doing the things we need to do as a company versus keeping the community involved and informed. So, with that said, let me see if I can provide an overview of what we're thinking the goals are for the next version of Flock, from a user experience perspective.

In Danphe, we want to set in place the user experience pattern Flock 1.0 through (hopefully) Flock 2.0. What this means is that as we add additional objects into the browser (e.g., People), we don't want to have to revamp the entire experience to support it - new objects and actions just plug in. After many, many (no really, many!) meetings, we've come up with the following overall UX Pattern:

Consumption of special content

One of the things we've gotten really great feedback about is our News view. When you think about it, the News view is simply a specialized view that's optimized for a given kind of content, in this case feeds.

At a higher level, we believe that these special content views (we call them exclusive views internally) represent a specific user task (like "I want to catch up on news" or "I want to see what's going with my group of friends"). Because it's your task right now (one might even say it's your goal if you want to get all Cooper on it), it's important to help the user focus on accomplishing it. Everything else is still just a click away, and the special Flock actions (like posting to a blog or sharing) are available for each content item.

With all that said, for Danphe, we're going to use this same approach for the special kind of content that Flock supports. In Danphe, this means People, Photos and News.

Notifications

So the biggest problem with notifications in Cardinal (the current release of Flock) is that the topbar tries to guess what you want to see when you click on it. If you have a lot of friends (which I hope you do), then the topbar is guessing a lot! This gets to be a problem, particularly if you're using it to photo comment, or even if you just close and then re-open the topbar because you want to get some of your screen back. Sigh.

How do we do this better? First, let's remember that we have these new snazzy exclusive view. When you think about it, the notifications are pretty closely tied to the exclusive views we talked about above. They are, after all, a preview of what you're going to get if you go there.

In Danphe, when you have new content, a badge will appear over each of our exclusive views (People, Photos or News). Rather than just having a badge, we'll actually show a number of new items since you last checked. When you mouse over, we'll show you a window that previews the new content. This way, you can make a better informed decision about if you want to see the new stuff. One side note: in Danphe, we're hoping to support detaching elements of the UI into it's own window (optionally, of course) - this means you can have your Flock updates window hanging out on your desktop. As new content becomes available, the notifications window will auto-refresh - no effort required!

Bottombars

In a post yesterday, I mentioned that we're likely moving to bottom bars. Part of the reason why we moved it to the status bar is to clear up any confusion between the consumption views at top, and the utility actions of the bottom bars. We're thinking there will be three bars: People, Photos and Notes.

Bottombars have two different ways they're invoked: implicitly as a result of a drag, or explicitly as a result of a click.

If you drag content onto the notes bottombar, it opens so you can create a new note. Once you've let go of the mouse button (completed your drop), the bottombar will close. If you drag content onto a personbar, you can share that content with a person (we'll go into more detail later). If you drag a photo to the photobar, it will upload it. You get the idea.

Clicking on a bottombar will pin it open. Our new auto refresh means you'll have a running ticker of current content for whatever view you want!

Notes? Notes?! What are notes? Notes the next step of web snippets. You still create them the same way web snippets are created. All web snippets will be HTML, even if it's just an image. As such, when you edit it, instead of working in a small window (and on the mac, modal), you'll edit them in our enhanced blog editor, complete with inline spell check.

Sidebars

Right now, sidebars in Flock are weird. We know this (don't get me started on the tab shift when you move in and out of news). For Danphe, when you have a tree view that's an essential part of consuming that type of content (e.g., the news sidebar as part of News), it will be part of the tab. We're calling this side nav internally.

This leaves standard sidebars. We're still going to have them. Two of them by default: History and Favorites. They'll behave just as they should.

Hopefully this post whets your appetite for the next version of Flock. Talk soon.