Excitement!! Thrills!!

Thank you so much for all of the thoughtful responses you gave to my survey. It kills me that I have to turn so many people away but I received four times as many responses as I have slots available. I sent out invites this afternoon. I learned a lot from your responses and it was good reinforcement that I'm building a product that people want. I think River of News for the iPhone will hit the mark for a lot of you.


My wife said I should have been more excited in my last post.

 

I'm really excited about the iPhone version! I was never quite sure if the scrolling and swiping would translate well to the smaller screen. There's a lot more space to work with on the iPad and it's more suitable for long form reading. You may not sit down to read a long article as often on the iPhone but the navigation principles in River of News work beautifully on the device. Scrolling and swiping are simple and consistent gestures that you can execute with one hand.

One of my biggest complaints about iPhone apps are deep navigation hierarchies that require me to maintain a mental model of where I am. It's a small screen so app designs often feature lots of screen wipes that lose context. Think of the common newsreader hierarchy. It starts with folders, then you tap into feeds, then you tap into article summaries, then you tap into a single article. That's four levels to go down and back up with screens that often look kind of the same.

Remember the two screen shots I posted the other day?

   

There it is, your entire app hierarchy. It's two levels with distinct visual designs and no screen wipes. If you want to navigate to an entirely different spot in your feed list you open the drawer and choose the feed. Isn't that better than tapping up through three levels of lists and then back down again?

Of course, swiping between feeds carries over from the iPad to the iPhone. You don't ever have to look at your feed list. Lists aren't fun. They feel like work. The goal is to enjoy the content, not manage it like email. Set up your most commonly used feeds in Google Reader to be sequential and you just swipe through them.

You are often doing things in short chunks of time on the iPhone. You have a couple of minutes to kill so you start up your newsreader. Do you want to spend your time choosing this or that or from little lists or do you want it to show you big pictures and engaging content? Do you want to find little buttons to tap while one hand is carrying a grocery basket and you are shuffling in line, or do you want big sweeping gestures like scrolling and swiping?

Something else I don't like about many iPhone apps are tiny pictures and unhelpful ten word snippets of text. This doesn't draw me in. It doesn't tell me whether I want to read the article. Most of the time it causes me to just gloss over the content and three minutes later I'm done and I haven't read anything. When I use River of News I read things. Big pictures and full article text gets me interested.

I'm reading my feeds far more than I ever have on the iPhone. Facebook had even replaced RSS as my go-to time killer on the phone. But finally having River of News on the phone changes that. I have a way to read my news that doesn't feel like a chore and fits how I use my phone.