Stick to your styleguide
I frequently use the app from the newspaper platform "Falter" and am not really happy with either the look nor the usability.
So in order to hone my skills in Appdesign I challenged myself to give the app a new look - in one hour.
So UX comes first. The app is using a common bottom navigation with three nav-links and a sidebar-menu for account and settings.
But as I see it, the sites in the bottom navigation should be like small applications within an app. In the Falter-App they are more or less
different views of the same content. So I got rid of that and put it all into one site.
Of course now you can't put a huge ad on the main site (which maybe was the reason for the seperate sites), but I only considered user-needs here and
not company interests.
I put the bookmarks into the sidebar menu, since I guess they are easy enough to reach in there. With that I was pretty happy.
The view when reading the content is perfect which is to be expected from a newspaper platform. So I didn't make any changes there.
After that I looked at the UI. What I still don't understand is why Falter uses two completely different looks on their website
and their App. With Falter I connect a white and papery look. I know their black type-logo on white background. But for the app they decided to
use the complete opposite, which is the reason I continuosly cannot find the app.
Also the black is actually-plain-#000000-black ... which never looks good in a UI. That's why
you always use a dark gray instead of plain black. Instead I used their white, and for the icon their falter logo with the illustration (which I think is the coolest and should be used everywhere).
The colors for the app come from this logo and made for a continuos look on both their website and app.
I made it in just under an hour and was pretty happy with the result. It seems closer to their styleguide than before and a bit more simplistic.
What I learned:
- Prototyping under pressure
- Styleguides are there to be used
- Figma is an absolute beast by now. It's crazy how good it is.