Friday mobile - Forget to remember

The first few seconds, and vapour design.

I was searching for a Google Reader client for the desktop. After a long search in the internet, posting a question to Quora, twitter etc, I am yet to find one, which has a beautiful user interface. Then I realized, using a lot of mobile/tablet applications has driven the User Experience (UX) expectation level a few bars higher. The "Windows Forms" like interface does not interest me anymore, and this is case of lot of other users around.

Why UX and UI are very important to a mobile application is that the attention span of a mobile user is very very less compared to a Desktop user. Most of the times, you are mentally prepared to use the PC when you are sitting in front of a PC, but a mobile screen is unlocked at any time, in the restroom, in the bus, during a TV commercial and even worser situations, where you just have a few moments to take off. The application UX has the big responsibility of engrossing you in the experience in this short span.

We believe Friday is a very unique application, which paints the tone of your life. The events, people, places, the context and the information in Friday should set the tone of the application. I didn't want to add any tone to the application ourselves, rather, the content in your timeline and dashboard should set the tone. A B/W photography enthusiast would have a Friday timeline which complements his photography and gray shades, or a music lover would have a timeline which is musical. What is important is that our own design should not add any overtone to these. The design should be invisible and should let the content take over. You might be thinking this is similar to Metro design, but though Metro gives importance to the content, it has a very strong design theming. Metro is more like a liquid design, which takes the shape of the content, but is visible as well. But, we want to take it a level further, a design which is invisible and content is the only thing that captures your eye, the design framework is in vapour form.

Was inspired a lot from the Helvetica typeface (font), it does not convey any meaning with its style, but lets the content of the text do it. You should watch this full feature film (Documentary) on Helvetica, if you are a typeface freak like me.

P.S. I would love to see your responses/opinions on this post.

via blog.friday-app.com