Denegro about sidebars on Gmail for iPad

27/06/2010

Very sharp article by Alberto Romero (Denegro) about the use and misuse of available space in Gmail for iPad: Back to sidebars and popups.

It left me thinking about Planetaki and its iPad version, whether it should have a sidebar or not.

There are 2 comments in this article:

  1. 28/06/2010César Astudillo say:

    My two cents:

    iPad sidebars allow you to make master-detail screens, in which you can see simultaneously an item list, and the contents of one of the elements in the list. They will be useful to the extent that the user will want to skim the items in the list: rapidly scan the list, stumble upon an item that looks promising, decide to scan the contents of the item to confirm whether it’s worth reading, read it (or not), keep on scanning the list.

    If the user likes to use the list view to skim the headlines before drilling down into the articles, not having a sidebar would lead to “pogo-stick navigation”: jumping back and forth among the list screen and the detail screen. A sidebar would keep the user from pogo-sticking, and that would be welcome by the user.

    This said, a detail screen with next/prev buttons is also a good solution, provided that loading and displaing a new article at the press of these buttons is lightning fast (for me, this is indispensable). This is the way I like to use Reeder, my iPad RSS reader of choice. I find “channel-surfing” among full-page articles in portrait mode way more pleasurable and less stressful than skimming a list. Maybe skimming a list would be more efficient (I’m sure it would be, in terms of hundreds of posts skimmed per hour), but what the heck, it feels too much like work. And peeking through my feeds should feel like pleasure not business…

    I think the choice about having a sidebar or not should be dictated by the kind of reading behaviour you want to support the most, not by what looks more clean or more busy. Nevertheless, these two criteria might well converge in the case of Planetaki :-)

  2. 28/06/2010Javier Cañada say:

    Right, César. List skimming is the predominant (the only) behavior in planetaki, therefore killing the sidebar may be a good idea :)

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