Show HN: UXArchive - How the best iPhone apps handle userflows | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: UXArchive - How the best iPhone apps handle userflows

uxarchive.com

116 pointsLeonW35 comments

I have built this site with my friend Nathan. I am a designer myself and wanted to build something to help people build better iPhone apps! Would love your ideas on other awesome user flows I could add to the site! Do you know any great onboard, explore, search flows?

I think this app is excellent, both in its idea, its (brief) presentation and what it promises to become, but the execution could use some work for now...

Random concerns that I have, assuming you want this to grow into a big, comprehensive UX flow database:

- There shouldn't be a search if I can only select from existing content and can't actually search, a dropdown would do fine for now.

- If you're to keep the search bar, at least add a friendly fail message when I search for something that isn't listed, like "No results, but take a look at what we have here instead!"

- How do you plan to scale? User submitted screenshots? Scraping the app store and providing a means for users to tag flows themselves? Ideally this needs a clever system that scales independently of the work you put into maintaining it...

- Speaking of tags, you should add a tagging system for each flow anyways since there's a variety of names people will use to refer to those things, and this would help with the search a lot.

Anyways, don't get me wrong, I like the idea and I want to see it grow beyond just a demo into something really useful. I merely think that, as a UX person, this has room for improvement, so keep up the good work and keep on iterating!

Thanks for all these ideas! The good news is that most of them are already being built!

You know what? I am a iOS developer and I can tell you that no matter how good your application is, without advertising, you will get nothing. There are many great applications in App Store, however, no one cares. The new search function of iOS App Store, and the new top charts, Apple only wants customer to get application from there, because those applications are GREAT, and your new application to them, is just another number. So what I say? Forget about this content, find someone who can post the review of your application to some famous website such as HN, Engadget, Cult of Mac... If your application is not too bad, you will always get the thing you want. Maybe, find some companies that could help your application go into the Top 10 is the best way.

I don't think this is remotely relevant to this post, which about building a better UX in iOS applications.

It is pretty relevant...How do you objectively measure a "better UX"? IMO , there is no better measure than the users voting with their wallets (ie purchasing the app) . In my experience, all these dribbble orgasm inducing designs just don't matter. Sure they may get your app featured by Apple, but good luck building a business based on winning that lottery. As an experiment, go on iTunes and tell me how many of the top non-games features a design with so-called better UX. My simple theory of iOS UX design? Do shit that users expect!!

I agree that "better UX" is entirely subjective, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. My point was that this is a UX-centric discussion and a mini-rant about advertising and marketing isn't really germane.

This is a marketing problem. If your designer is posting on Dribbble, your app is definitely being seen; my iOS concepts get more views than anything because that's what people are searching for these days. People may like the design, but may not have a reason to actually download it.

In the same vein, all of these "pretty app UI" sites rely heavily on submissions. If you think you have an app worth looking at that could possibly convert eyes to sales, submit them to these sites.

Additionally, "Doing what users expect" doesn't always have a straight-forward answer.

My buddy that makes one of these apps wanted to email you something, but got this when emailing team@uxarchive.com :

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

team@uxarchive.com

Technical details of permanent failure: Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 554 554 5.7.1 <team@uxarchive.com>: Relay access denied (state 13).

Tried submitting my app and got the same.

Thanks for trying to reach out and very sorry that it didn't work. We had some DNS problems. The email service should be back in three hours.. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Why only iPhone apps and not both Android and iPhone apps?

We will add Android apps support in the future, but we need to figure out what the best way is for doing that, as the variety of screens sizes and resolutions on Android devices is much greater. Don't forget to subscribe to the newsletter or follow @uxarchive on Twitter to be informed when we add Android support :)

A lot of pretty userflows. Excellently detailed, really.

But haven't you already failed to a large degree if you have to explain how the system works?

Thanks! Well it's not about explaining user flows but visualizing them so that you can compare them. It's really useful to do so before starting a project to see patterns, interesting ideas ets. I found it also really helpful to discuss with your colleagues...

How does UXArchive handle...displaying images:

At a fixed size, aligned constantly 200px from the top of my screen without ability to scroll down, effectively cutting all images in half. (standard 1200*800 laptop screen)

There are other issues with the image popup, some times the images are displayed on 2 rows and some times on 1, still without any vertical scroll so i cant see the second row. When there are many images the horizontal scroll is annoying and sometimes my mouse wheel scrolls the background and not in the popup window. Keyboard navigation like next/previous buttons would be good.

Otherwise a pretty good idea, you just need a larger collection of apps.

Thanks for the feedback. Can you please send us some screenshots of problems you see? email team at uxarchive dot com

We will be adding more content shortly. Any ideas in mind on specific user flows you would want to see added?

Dont have time for screenshots but i can tell you that i'm on firefox 17

Thanks for reporting this. May I ask what OS and screen resolution you are using?

Great resource. Two other amazing resources for mobile patterns are http://pttrns.com/ and http://www.mobile-patterns.com/

Reminds me of pttrns (http://pttrns.com/). Being able to look at a lot of apps can be a source of great motivation if you're having designer's block.

Very nice, got me thinking why the heck I never bother looking for something like this for websites.

Found these two:

http://ui-patterns.com/ http://quince.infragistics.com/

A lot of room for improvement.

Does everyone use something like this or am I just over-estimating the importance of a library to browse for UI patterns?

Thanks! And thanks for the links. I'll try to list them into the about section. I have listed a couple of them already, you should have a look!

Great resource! It is key to design the first run experience to align with and support our goals as online services.

Had started a similar experiment on what we call the First Run user experience on Tumblr a few months back, but lost steam after a few apps:

http://thefirstrun.tumblr.com/ We were also adding commentary on the flows.

Holy..! This is awesome. Made my day as a fellow designer/ux guy. I am in the process of mocking up a new app now and I'm sure this will come in handy. Good job!

Thanks man! What user flows should I add?

I really like how you can take a specific facet of a mobile application see how it is implemented across various applications. Very nice design.

Thanks! We will be adding more user flows from Feedly so stay tuned!

Sorry again for the email problem, team@uxarchive.com is back up! Please contact us if you have any user flows in mind we should add!

Hmm I think this is a good idea but the layout on iPhone is poor. I'd suggest making it more usable from a phone.

awesome stuff but, scrolling left to right in userflows pop-up is difficult. Given that this is a ux site, surely you can make it slightly easier to navigate

also, your feedback email id doesn't work (mail bounced back)

HOLY SHIT! As a designer, this is blowing my mind.

Wow thanks! This is the best compliment! Any user flow I should add?

This awesome, I'm digging it!

Looks awesome!

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