Mockup previews of Appleseed 1.0, feedback appreciated.
opensource.appleseedproject.org
opensource.appleseedproject.org
There are definitely good reasons to look like Facebook (which I'm pretty sure is intentional). The most obvious reason is user familiarity: people know how Facebook works and they're going to be a lot less intimidated if they've seen something like it before. However, one not-necessarily-obvious downside to doing this is that people know Facebook and know how it works, and if things look like they do on Facebook but don't behave the same then they're going to be confused. That's not necessarily a reason to change the look entirely, but it definitely is something you need to be aware of if you're going this route with your design. Another potential issue is that people really don't like change. (For an example, see your Facebook news feed any time there's a design change.) If you look similar to Facebook but not as good, you may have issues getting over people's initial reactions.
There are a lot of little details I could pick out, but I think your biggest problem right now is with spacing and whitespace. The info page, for example (http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/preview/images/info.p...) has way too much whitespace around the actual information. Whitespace can be a good thing when your content is balanced with it, but right now the whitespace is dominating the page and it looks very empty, which is not at all the impression you want to give off.
The other thing I think you can improve on immediately is your use of gradients and drop shadows. Right now they're too obvious: a little goes a long way. The design is otherwise very flat and text-based (not a bad thing!), and so they stand out a ton and look out of place. The combination of the square tabs and the very large drop shadow is especially jarring. As a first step, I'd suggest getting rid of all (or almost all: the subtle blue to white from top to bottom is working pretty well) of them. Focus on getting the basics of spacing and hierarchy right first, because that's much more important.
As a final note, the Appleseed logo in the top left is going to cause some undesirable behavior if left like that. Either the logo is going to be hidden by the edge of the window or the picture when the browser gets narrower, or it's going to cause a horizontal scrollbar. Both are bad things.
Hopefully that was at least somewhat helpful and gave you some things to think about. And like I said above, I'd be happy to give more (and more specific feedback) later in the week once my thesis is finished.
I also thought this was kind of strange. It looks alright in the mockups, but I can't think of a behavior for that logo that would deal well when you shrink the view horizontally. The design seems to suggest that the left margin will remain empty space, as trying to slide it to the left would cause the profile picture to overlap the logo entirely.
Neither leaving the blank space nor covering up the logo seems ideal to me.
- Designs that immediately make you cringe
- Designs that make you analyze for areas of improvement
- Designs that are so elegant you simply admire
I think these mockups fall into the "areas of improvement" category. They aren't bad by any means, but I immediately saw myself saying "that shade of blue contrasts with the rest of the color scheme" and "that is an inappropriate use of whitespace" and "the padding for that navigation looks unbalanced."
I think with some iterations and a "designers eye for the developer guy" these could jump to the elegant category. I think you're past the chasm; designs that make you cringe can't be iterated upon.
I would love to hear HN's thoughts on these, I'll be taking criticism to heart as I break these out into HTML over the next few weeks.
Did you make these in Photoshop, or HTML? Did you do these yourself, or have these made up?
Either way, FANTASTIC work.
I did these myself, I'm not a designer instinctively, but I had a vision for how I saw things working, so I just started hacking away and refining things until I found something I liked.
And I did them in Photoshop, that's how I usually do web design, since it's what I'm most comfortable in.
Gut reaction is that you are clearly inspired by Facebook, but there's only so many ways to peel this particular orange. I'd consider a primary color change as a quick and painless way to distance the two; I think it's the blue that's keying me to Facebook the most. There's an argument about whether that's fair, that they psychologically own social blue in my mind, but better to differentiate (in my mind).
It's true, there's certain paradigms that just work, and I played around quite a bit with more experimental approaches, and I just couldn't see the user flow working in a way that didn't throw users completely for a loop.
I'd consider a color change as a quick and painless way to distance the two.
With the beauty of Appleseed themes and CSS, I'll probably try and have three or four variations on this layout for the 1.0 release.
If they ever want this to appeal to anyone but alpha-geeks, they should emphasize how the unique features make the _experience_ on Appleseed better than it is on Facebook/other networks.
Instead, I think the most important thing is to become the de facto foundational software for anyone who wants to build a social networking site.
Do you want to set up a social network just for cat owners? How about one for orchestra students around the world? Or a fan club of the Anime series, Cowboy Bebop? Then we want you to run Appleseed. It being open source is a huge benefit for that. And the distributed features are gravy. Or icing. Depending on your tastes.
Users may not ever know what Appleseed is, and that's fine.
In other words, Appleseed isn't the next big thing, but we want the next big thing (or things) to be built using Appleseed.
In this Ning-like scenario, what's the value of the distributed protocol you spent so much time on?
You can now login to lolcats.example.org using that identity. So it acts as a single sign-on.
There are other planned features, like profile linking and cloning so that you can have multiple identities tied to a single user, but that's how it works for now.
Linking, Cloning: I have two accounts, on a.com, and b.org. When the two are linked, actions taken on a.com are duplicated on b.org as my b.org identity. Friends on b.org are not made aware of the existence of my a.com identity. There are subtle differences between linking and cloning that are still being worked out.
Profile forwarding: Works just like email forwarding. I leave one site, and move to another, and at the original site, I leave a forwarding address.
But, IMO it needs a bit more polish. To a designer's eye, this immediately screams "programmer-designed". You may want to hire a designer - hand them these mockups - and let them add a "designers' touch" [more padding, better typographic alignment, softer contrasts, etc].
That said - this is a big improvement over the previous design. Also, please don't feel like I am ragging on your work, just a bit of constructive criticism.
Just adding the required usability to allow single-users to administer a social networking instance adds a whole ton of complexity to the software. Way more than something like Bittorrent.
I think it's possible, at some point, but for now, I think a more conservative server-to-server approach is necessary.
It's probably still too ambitious, though, but that's why it's fun. :)
A+ Job.
All those years throwing together flyers for my friends punk rock bands paid off, maybe. :)
Luckily, Appleseed is very flexible, so it's not only possible to change the colors, but to radically rearrange the layout while maintaining the functionality.
I expect many sites running Appleseed will hire designers to "brand" their site in a way that appeals to their users.
but you cant argue that its something revolutionary.
I wouldn't, actually. I think social software works best when it's pragmatic and conservative. The revolution is under the hood with distributed social networking.
See my post here on the subject: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2429993
I believe in social networks, their value and need - but the current execution in the area is clearly leading us down a dark digital path.
I recall when appleseed was first announced, Ill need to look at it again...