If you’ve been away, welcome back, and by the way, I’ve been blogging our design process for the changes we need to make to support OpenSocial in Connect.
Today, Rich posted a few new mockups today of his vision for our Connect (and ultimately, Mix) OpenSocial UI.
The first mockup shows Rich’s vision for the OpenSocial app detail page.
This is the page you’ll see if you click on an app summary in the app directory or if you see in your Activity Log that someone in your network has installed an app and you decide to click through to get more information. We may even show installed apps on each person’s profile, in which case, you’d see this page if you clicked through on the link.
Rich also finished a mockup of the canvas view that will be available to developers and users. We plan to offer developers the ability to build a canvas view of their app/s; this view is essentially the large version of an app. If you use iGoogle and have the sandbox view enabled, you can see what I mean.
Basically, the canvas view allows for more features and functionality to be surfaced because the developer isn’t constrained to a small, widget-sized area. More real estate means more features for apps.
If you’re savvy to the platform, you’ll notice we will eventually be removing ideas (and answers) from the core platform and redeploying them as OpenSocial apps. This serves a few purposes:
- It allows ideas and questions to be portable to any OpenSocial container, preserving all the information we’ve collected so far.
- It allows people to customize their Connect (and Mix) experience, i.e. if you don’t use ideas or answers, you can remove them.
- It allows other developers to extend the functionality of ideas to include specific features that they want, e.g. idea status and lifecycle management.
So, what do you think? Once Rich is done with his mockups, we’re off to development. This is your chance to influence the direction of Connect and Mix, so why no spead a few minutes thinking critically about the design?
I like to involve new people in design because as the people in charge of caring and feeding for Connect/Mix, we tend to be too close to the problem. I find that new blood, opinions and ideas are often what you need to break out of a funk or to make really important strides.
Find the comments and help us design the future. Seriously.
Just want to say the UI is fantastic and “Ideas” app is a great idea 🙂
Hey Jake looks like awesome work!! If you guys want, I can reach out to some of my usability contractor contacts, if you want to get any user feedback (in detail) before you start coding. Otherwise, keep up the great work.
Hi Jake,
I will pass on this post to some of the EMEA people who we know are using Connect and Mix, to see if we can get any feedback from them.
Frank
Yeah, Rich does a great job. Making everything an app allows each user to customize the experience, and everything is portable. Win-win.
Thanks Misha. We're just looking for impressions about the design, nothing too formalized. If you and your pals want to head over to Skitch and comment, we'd appreciate the thoughts.
This exercise is meant to be a nice way for people to see how we're evolving and let them add their two cents. You should too.
Thanks Frank. Nothing super formal, just impressions and thoughts. If nothing else, at least you can see how the UI will change.