UPDATE 5/30

Playing with some new things tonight to clean things up and address some areas I wasn't super happy with earlier.

iPad RSS Reader - image 1 - student project

iPad RSS Reader - image 2 - student project

iPad RSS Reader - image 3 - student project

UPDATE 5/28

Added the main page. The service works as so: many users will continually be adding articles to their personal collections (sorta like boards on Pinterest) and other users can follow you or your collections. The main page of the app, seen here, is essentially the curated list of whats hot right now.

Still missing is the abilty to navigate to your collections from this page, as well as the detail page. I'm working on those now.

iPad RSS Reader - image 4 - student project

iPad RSS Reader - image 5 - student project

UPDATE 5/25

I'm taking a slightly updated approach to the layout and architecture of the project. I felt, at least my own personal use of an app like this, I'd like the Collection, or the folders full of articles, to be availiable whenever I would need them. What I am testing out now is to see if a tray/modal overlay system might work better.

How this comp would work:

from a previous page, (to be shown later, I'm still working on it) the user will click a button or perform a gesture. This will pull up a tray from the bottom of the screen
The big read area with the huge text in it will be semi transparent, showing the previous pages content below it. I'm still working on that page, so it's not there yet.
The tray itself will allow the user to swipe left and right in order to find the folder of content they are looking for.
If the user clicks one of the folders, this tray will close and take them to that new page.
Shown in this comp as well is the abilty to create a new folder, should the user wish to.
Swiping the "bye bye" button up top will also close this tray.

iPad RSS Reader - image 6 - student project

———————————————

CONCEPT

I was toying with the idea of why i use RSS readers, and what it is about them that works for me personally. After 4 or 5 concepts that didn't really excite me all that much, I hit on a nugget of an idea that I like: what if there was a service that paired my RSS feeds with something similar to Pinterest. The idea is that I very commonly save thing for later in Reeder, or via Readability, or in the past using Delicious. None of them really have the simplicity of Pinterest, nor do they have the ability to find other things you might be intetrested in.

Since this class is just about designing something and not having to worry about the logistics of wheather or not I have enough free time to dive into a a real site like this, it seems like a really exciting exersize. Also, it has enough pages to allow to stretch my legs creatively, especially since it is so focused on presenting text to the user, aka the point of this class.

Below are 4 ideas of page that would be found within the app. They are definitely early ideas and obviously need a lot more thought put into them, but it's a start, and that's what is important.

Here are a few notes about it:

Upon opening the app, you'd see a list page of content that you and people that you've followed have added to their profiles.
Like Pinterest, as a user you can create buckets/boards to place content into. It can be stuff like "great portfolios" or "wayfinding research" or "design patterns", etc etc etc.
Users can follow a user, or only a few of their boards (yes, duh this is a rip off of Pinterest)
Like Readability we'd bring in full articles rather than just RSS snippets.
Also a part of the main page there will be a link to see all "upcoming posts", this will be your RSS feed. You can go through this list andread em, add things to your profile, or delete em.
There is definitely more to think through...

iPad RSS Reader - image 7 - student project

iPad RSS Reader - image 8 - student project

iPad RSS Reader - image 9 - student project

iPad RSS Reader - image 10 - student project

iPad RSS Reader - image 11 - student project

Anthony Dines

Product Designer at Control Group

83

82