I started this as an email to omnigroup, and I’ll probably send it separate but since it’s a bit…general…it might be better to have a discussion. I’m thinking out loud a bit here, but I’ll bold my main points.
When I’m looking at my projects hierarchy in OF2 for iPhone, I often just don’t know where I am or what I’m looking at.
Example: I worked on an live event over the past few weeks, it started as multiple single action lists, which turned into projects and then those projects sometimes turned into folders of projects. (this is typical use for me in OF over the past many years) but when looking at a list of….“things” in OF, I couldn’t tell if I was looking at folders, projects, action groups, or actions. Basically, I find the visual hierarchy in OF2 to be…lacking clarity
Sometimes I noticed the •••• underneath a list item which clued me in if it was a project (assuming I had filled out enough actions to have those dots), and sometimes I would glance over at the > or [Folder Icon] to notice that, but it wasn’t obvious until I did any of those, and everything looked the same.
When I did get “lost” one of the things that I would do is look at the top nav bar…which now doesn’t have a current location, which most iOS apps do have. We can’t get better without trying something new, but this change is SO disorienting, it clutters my list of contents with a “title” bar (although this does give me project options. I like that) and removes my “title” from where I’m looking for it.
Not to sound like John Siracusa, but I found that the typical hierarchical list views that iOS used (Old view scrolls off left, new view scrolls in from right) gave me a very good sense of “place”. I knew where I was. OF2 has a project “open” to list the tasks. This is a neat idea and I think there’s a lot of merit to it…but I don’t think it happens quite right. The opening animation is extremely quick and there’s no depth to the new background layer that’s exposed. Meaning, it kind of just looks like something animates over the rest of the list but it doesn’t look like anything’s changed. If there was some secondary animation, like the gap opens to an empty space and then the sub-items faded in, I think it could be very, very helpful. Another idea would be for it to happen slightly slower for more clarity of movement, but I could see this being worse in lots of other ways.
Those are all the specific requests I can make. Overall, I’d love more color, more solid shapes, some heaviness (I went to bold text on my phone just for OF2), and maybe some Letterpress app/Material Design esque shadows? I know we’re all flat now, but I’d love just a hint of skeuomorphism.
Sorry for the rant, it’s just been something I’ve been thinking about for a while now.
