Nifty Navigations

Another part of the assignments for this week was to choose three designs from Mobile Design Pattern Gallery and blog about why we like them. So, let's get started!

First off is Flikr's dashboard design. The search bar doesn't take up too mach space, so it doesn't take the attention away from the main content, the pictures, but it's still in a convenient place for users to access whenever they want. The same goes for the navigation away from the dashboard found out the bottom of the screen. I've never used this app since I don't have flickr, but I wonder if there's an option to change the size of the pictures on how they appear on the dashboard.

Next is the Duke University App's Springboard. At least, I'm assuming that's what this is. I think it's clever to mimic the way the iOS for the iPhone looks for an app FOR the iPhone so it's a way of navigating that the user is familiar with. That's basically what caught my eye for this navigation design choice.

And then third is Net-A-Porter's Springboard. I rather like this because it reminds me of how clothing websites look, such as Gilt and MYHABIT (need a membership to see it).
There's a little preview of what products are available before accessing the gallery of things behinds each of those buttons. It's clean and already sorted by category for users' ease of navigation.

Basic Blogging

In the subject of blogging, I suppose I've been doing so since 2004 in a more-journalistic style through an art/design gallery/community I was a part of back in middle school to high school. Then in high school I got into video blogging, vlogging, via YouTube and blogTV which led me to using the micro blogger Twitter. Unfortumately, I barely use those platforms as often as I used to now. Being restricted to 140 characters for Twitter, I wanted something more, so I moved to Tumblr around 2009 and haven't really drifted away from it since. I find it easy to navigate, but the recent update on the Dashboard's interface is rather frustrating since it's extremely different from what it has been for the past 4 years.

This week, one of our assignments was to pick a blog and write about an article from one of those blogs based on another article on effective blog posts. Randomly from the list, I chose lovelyui.com, which happens to be a Tumblr blog.

Lovely UI's front page as of May 4, 2013

 

Since I'm a frequent user of Tumblr, I know that it's heavily image based, and most of the time those images don't have a description to go with it unless it's sharing interesting facts about the picture, reactions to the image, or witty comebacks to previous comments. Lovely UI is no exception to this rule. I can't really choose an article since there aren't any with words that describe anything in depth on the blog besides the tags that help categorize the photos and help users find those pictures and less-than-a-sentence saying what it is and where it's from. The site itself is more like a gallery of mobile design interfaces that people can use for references. If you click on a post, it's basically the same thing that you see on the main blog, minus the other pictures.

 

http://www.lovelyui.com/post/47379687492/

So, I'd classify this "blog" more of an online gallery than an actual blog.