Horizontally scrolling sites have always been in a minority but seem to have increased in popularity in recent years. We’ve never made one ourselves, partly as it’s only a choice suitable for a certain projects (nearly exclusively portfolio sites) but also the combination of hardware limitations, finger dexterity and need to include additional UI instructions make it a difficult decision to justify. The experience of navigating a horizontally scrolling site with a mouse is simply too much of a usability obstacle.

But the mobile revolution has thrown an interesting curve ball into the mix that few (if any) have yet to exploit. On a smart phone the traditional scroll direction of up/down is maintained for most experiences that with one-handed operation must be used by the thumb. The thumb moves left/right almost as naturally as it does up/down (something the index finger on a mouse does not), a point that has been utilised by some native app experiences such as turning the page in iBooks or accessing additional information in tweetbot. With the introduction of tablets the gesture of swiping your hand led by a finger is as natural as turning the page in a book, but the convention has mostly been to skeuomorphically imitate that page turn metaphor or simply access an additional layers of information inside a traditional vertically scrolling interface. Or simply unlock your phone.
 

We think it might be an interesting experiment to use a horizontal scroll to deliver a complete mobile web experience. A browser detect could be used to serve a vertically scrolling site to the desktop experience, and a reformatted horizontally scrolling one to a mobile/tablet. We imagine media-queries could probably be used in much the same way with a bit of customization. There would certainly be some limitations with regards to fixing the height as any device rotates but these variables can also be detected today and so the format could rearrange responsively to fit. See our rough example below. We imagine there would other technical challenges in implementing this solution but none so insurmountable to make the idea an impossibility.
 

Clearly limited to less-copy driven sites still, as the natural reading format of left-right top-bottom, but could this be an area yet to be explored? Have you seen any examples of horizontal scrolling and responsive design used in this way? Is it even possible? We think there’s some untapped potential in this usually unpopular web-design choice. Keen to hear all and any thoughts.

If we get the opportunity we’ll also explore the idea further ourselves. If it works we may even use this in a future project.

Anyone working in screen based design (or any design related discipline) you should watch this talk and it will inspire you. Guaranteed.
 

More videos form the event available to watch here. Many inspiring talks from this great event.
 

Streaming/renting content is becoming a more convenient model for users who now have sufficient internet speeds, disposable income and no longer want shelves full of physical media, or have the time to wait around for the program they want to be aired. The internet has broken down all communication & delivery barriers making everything instant, and this is what we now expect of our televisual content.

There’s a lot to say on the subject and more authoritative people have said most of it already, so we’re using this post to aggregate a few recent and relevant opinions that we’d like to share.

The entire situation was best summarised recently by Robert Tercek who’s taken a slight divert of late form his usual social media (being the host of This Week in Social Media show) to talk about how the media industry is changing (as well as how social media is effected by and is affecting it) at MIPTV in Cannes.
 

 

Some further recommended reading on the subject:

• Why people pirate and what needs to change to stop it.
  By Craig Grannell on his blog Revert to saved.
• Why The Movie Industry Can’t Innovate and the Result is SOPA.
  By Steve Blank on his self-titled blog.
  

Please contribute anything else you find adds to this topic in the comment thread below.
 

We went around the houses a little trying to nail down the style and messaging, but once we were in agreement we pressed ahead and today pushed live the single page site. It’s completely responsive and in-line with the current blog design and evolves the brand communications nicely form what we started in print.

Still on our development list is:

• to make a wider responsive layout for the large percentage of a our traffic who have larger screen resolutions. Part of this project will be to move both the blog and the homepage into a centralised layout for desktop widths.
• to advance the use of the travelling menu – intended it to have a final ‘docking’ position, and to add a mobile version whereby the section title is present in a thin transparent bar (much like the character bracket labels for apple address book)
• Make all the graphics Retina ready using a device sniffer and serving up higher resolution graphics optimised for the format. – Done!

After this list is implemented we intend to start growing the site page by page, adding fuller case studies to each currently featured, growing the portfolio offering to the point where we’ll need a dedicated landing page. We also intend to build some SEO optimised landing pages or specific service offerings, and create a client login area where we can display work in progress and also share portfolio examples hat we cannot display publicly.

We’re quite pleased and look forward to slowly adding more pages, detail and features to the site as time goes on. We’re enjoying working on our own material in an agile fashion and hope to continue to do so, growing our presence online piece by piece.

What do you think?

Sparrow initially produced a desktop email client that closely resembled the mac twitter desktop app in appearance and stripped-back simplicity. We probably do 80% of our emailing through desktop clients during office hours and so found the Sparrow desktop app to be too simple for our needs. The demand to manage many projects and organize mails quickly (dragging conversations directly to a folder) requires a more complex UI provided by such staples as Apple Mail or Outlook. There is obviously a large market for the Sparrow desktop app but it was not we. Then along came the Sparrow iPhone app…

The interesting thing about a mobile application design is the screen real-estate restrictions and the necessary steps that must be designed-into the experience to integrate features such as filing away mails and organising multiple accounts. The native mail app in iOS can do all these things, but are generally achieved in a less-than-ideal user experience involving too many screens and clicks through a tree-like hierarchy. Doing this better is where Sparrow mail shines. The use of gestures to easily access accounts, folders, and gmail specific features such as priority inboxes are all just a swipe away. Folders neatly spectrum labeled and the ability to view either individual accounts or a unified inbox.

Upon installing the app you’re greeted with a very well produced and handy walkthrough of the key features, supported by an equally well-produced feature overview on their sales site.

Adding an account is made to seem easier than any other system we’ve experienced. Just your name, email address and password.

Much like the desktop app the feature set is very much tailored to a gmail/Google Apps user with favouriting and users of the priority inbox feature will find this a welcome addition to the app. Swiping the header to access filtered views on your inbox (whole inbox, unread, starred and Priority mail if turned on) is a clever addition.

The swipe to access actions form mail list is very useful (a convention borrow form the game-changing Twitter iOS app) allowing access to quick replying, forwarding, tagging, archiving and deleting (the distinction between which still baffles us).

The conversation view is brilliantly handled too, jumping you by default to the last message in the thread, using a pull-down/up to access previous. The pull-down to refresh message list is present of course, something most data fetching, list-based apps now utilise and something we find ourselves doing constantly inside the native Mail app to no avail.

Some more advanced options are available for those who wish to look for them, tidily squared away in a general setting area.

Overall it seems like a good alternative to the native Mail. The only thing stopping us using it as a complete replacement at present is the lack of notifications. We tend to deal with email as & when they arrive, so notifications are vital in a mobile app, but imagine a new release will be out soon with this feature added. Once in place we could see this replacing Mail as a day-to-day phone emailing, in much the same way Tweetbot has over the official twitter app. Or at least until app make a significant enough update to the native mail app to make it worth switching back. For most users on the organised/chaos line there are enough difference to make the switch worth while, but the real time-savers seem to be targeted at user on the more organised end of the spectrum. Those who need to deal with larger volumes of mail will definitely notice some time saving benefits.

Apart form the notifications and lack of Pop support it’s really quite hard to fault. There are inevitably a few very minor interface design changes we would have made, but I’d say they got this pretty damn right.

At £2.99 it’s not inexpensive (as far as aps go) but considering the amount of time you might use a mail app compared to say a game, the expense is more than justified. Recommend only bothering to purchase once push notifications are added though. Get it on the app store here.

 
Have you tried Sparrow? What do you think?
 

It represents an important perspective of ownership of creative material and how our market economy drives us to think that our ideas are property that can be legally protected. Without copying and remixing, without a certain degree of what can be described as plagiarism new ideas cannot evolve from old ones. Creation requires influence and everything we create is a direct result of all influences we’ve absorbed.

We think this is a an important issue to overcome in the software age, or we face the possibility of reaching a saturation point where no new development can occur due to fear of prosecution.

What do you think about copyright laws and how enforceable they should be? In particular about the growing number of Tech startups companies trying to protect their ideas and manufacturers of devices such as smart phone patenting every conceivable piece of hardware, software and even user experiences? Leave us your thoughts below.

In the meantime we highly recommend you watch the below 4 videos. If you’re short on time just watch the last one. Each is only about 10 min of content. If you like what you see help support the talented Kirby either by donating or on kickstarter with his new project ‘This is not a conspiracy’.

 
Our favorite quotes extracted from each video below:

1. “Led Zeppelin. They play extremely loud blues music…”

2. “Sorry about colonialism.”

3. “We need copying to build foundations of knowledge and understanding.”

4.”Most of us have no problem with copying, as long we we’re the ones doing it.”

 
Please leave your thoughts and responses below.

Upon installing the app, assuming you already have twitter accounts connected to your device OS, you are presented the option of adding them automatically, saving time on the usual login authentication method.

Clearly aimed at the twitter power-user, this app is fully laden with an impressive array of features. At a glance these are:

• Multiple account handling and switching (with independent settings)
• Easy viewing of individual tweet conversations, replies and retweets
• Filter timeline by your/others twitter lists
• Readability switch for webpages viewed form links
• Temporal or permanent timeline filtering of people, hashtags or clients
• Wide array of service connections (image/vid uploads, URL shortening, text uploads, read later and sync) that are all very well integrated into the experience
• Customisation of navigation, certain actions, retweet styles, display and post settings
• Time-gap loading
• Tweet translation (very useful!)
• Draft tweet management

Clearly the team at Tapbots have put a lot of time and effort into understanding where the official twitter app falls short and created a very well produced, fast working, slick application.

The in-timeline preview of images is a particularly nice touch, as is the hold-press on certain elements to reveal a list of available actions. For example, holding a hashtag allows you to either filter-out all tweets using that hashtag from your stream, or compose a new tweet using it.

This mute filter feature enables blocking of a hashtag, a feature many twitter users will be glad to receive, allowing you to hide tweets from people watching #xfactor or tweeting about the #uksnow. Even better that you can set a time limit on these filters – useful if you want to block a certain person if they’re not using hashtags while tweeting like mad about X-Factor.

The number of ways to gain access to a tweets details seems a little over the top at times. Swiping right views a conversation or left views replies (the difference between which is marginal). You can also tap the tweet to access the actions bar and select the details (eye) icon, or you can double-tap the tweet to get to the same place (this view doesn’t load in the number of replies or retweets – requiring a further tap to see if anything lies behind these sections, something that the official twitter app does do). Clearly they’re trying to allow users to choose which route to the information they want to use, but sometimes too much choice can be a bad thing, and in this instance we feel the number of options is overkill and slows down the user experience.

Its technical abilities are hard to fault. But the sheer number of them makes the app feel too overcrowded at times. It would be nice to have a greater level of customisation on certain features (as they supply with the triple tap), such as setting your desired actions for the swipe left/right gestures.

The UI design is very much in the style of their other apps; a technical and industrial feel with high contrast and tactile, textured interface. If you’d asked us a year ago we probably might have preferred this styling to one presented more modestly and flat. But today our style preference here at Every Interaction is starting to sway more in the direction of a simplified UI, taking more cues form interfaces such as Windows metro and Flipboard. A trend in design Instagram made just today with their newly updated iOS app & UI. The level of contrast and over-use of gradients and textures can be a little distracting in what is already a noisy display of data with tweets, avatars, actions and images. With tweetbot the eye has to work a little harder to scan the page and digest the information, than it does with the more subdued official twitter app UI – whose more tranquil tone aids tweet readability.

One other thing I think the official twitter app does better is the new ‘connect’ (@) tab – blending mentions, new follows and favorites into a (still filterable to view only mentions) about you stream. Something we think Tweetbot would benefit form adding.

Apart from these few niggles we think the Tweetbot app is a superbly produced application and we believe we’ll be using it day-to-day over the native twitter app. The next killer feature that this (or any other twitter client app) might be adding to further increase its usefulness might be in-app camera tools. A twitter client that brings it’s photography power inline with apps like Path, or Instagram (which in it’s new form released today adds a Lux filter), providing direct access to filter styles and tilt-shifting will truly be a powerful player in the market.

Where we think Tapbots have missed the boat on this one is in making a more customised experience for the iPad app. As the official twitter client update has yet to appear for iPad, users are desperate for something better and the tweetbot app although good, feels just like the iPhone app scaled up, not utilising the additional screen real-estate as well as it has done. The composition screen takes over the interface and you cannot load links while you continue to scan your timeline. Many more improvement opportunities available here, but we’re thankful to have an alternative to the now old and feature poor feeling official twitter iPad app. Annoyingly tweetbot is not a universal app, making them separate purchases – surely a tactical decision to maximise app revenue, but one we’ll let slide as these things are not cheap to produce and it is very well produced and worth paying for, even twice.

Have you tried Tweetbot? What in particular do you like about it’s features and UI, and what might you change?
 

Here at Every Interaction we are startup focussed, having helped many transition from infancy through to maturity and profitability, becoming shareholders on select projects and also started our own projects/IP becoming entrepreneurs and founders ourselves. We think this unique combination of perspectives puts us in a good place to contribute our two pence.

We agree that not every designer was made to be a founder. Being a ‘product’ person who is objectively focussed enough to know when to compromise and be a great manager are a rare combination of qualities to find in an individual. But they do exist. Often forged by the experience of seeing-through and being involved in many projects both from the inside and out.

The ever-increasing quality of web products and services in today’s market means a product with a poor user experience cannot compete and an excellent user experience is key to success. It’s just expected. Whether a business can always justify a full-time in-house designer is another question. Often these responsibilities can be fulfilled by external UE Design experts (ahem, such as ourselves) who specialise in helping startups get off the ground, develop and succeed. This can often work out more cost-effective than trying to find a designer either as a co-founder or full-time. At the opposite end of the scale some businesses have a need for a large dedicated design team in-house at all times, but this level of requirement exists only once a product is proven successful and/or is very well-funded. Not all startups are lucky enough to find themselves in this position in their earlier years.

The term ‘founder’ can mean many things, and does not necessarily mean tied to work at a company full-time, forever. To found something simply means you have the passion and drive to be one of the people to make the idea happen. Anyone creative who has a desire to build things will inevitably eventually want to move onto other projects, designer or not. Some see the only way to fulfil their creative desires to work on a variety of projects is through client work at agencies. But sitting on both sides of the fence we get to see the benefits of both and understand the greatest passion can come from having a sense of ownership with a product. This is why we will sometimes consider a work-for-shares deal for part of the fee to get startups off the ground, making us ongoing value-added shareholders/consultants, whilst continuing to deliver paid design work for the same client (now a partner).

As part of founding a company the goal is to get that business up, running and profitable. Once this has been achieved you can define the rulebook on how the business (and design) should be run, leaving you the freedom to either stay and manage this yourself (by hiring skilled but possibly junior people to do the day-to-day for you), or go and do it all over again with a new idea. Having had the passion to start a project you’ll forever be connected, wanting to contribute when important decisions need to be made, but if you want to cut all ties this is always possible.

There definitely used to be an agency-based snobbery of looking down upon those considered to have fewer opportunities in their career to be creative, stuck in a “client-side job”. We were all guilty and there were certainly true examples. But times have changed and more creative opportunities can often be found outside of agencies bringing with it a new breed of entrepreneurial designers, who may very well make suitable founders. Not to bad-mouth agency based client work as this is our core business and we love very minute of it, there are just other options out there to achieve the same level of creative fulfilment and being a startup founder is a great place to look. Here’s a great list of successful start-ups all founded by designers.

As more and more startups realise the value of User Experience Design we hope that our industry will grow. Also the number of designers involved directly with startups as founders of shareholders continue to expand helping take the next generation of products and service we all use to a new level of quality.

Couple of pictures of how we’ve applied the brand and what we sent out below.

Now we’ve got the brand out there we’re concentrating on the rest of the website, and hope to continue to post interesting things here so stayed tuned by RSS or follow us on twitter.

We were especially pleased with the notebook, whose cover was printed onto embossed colour plan card. Gave a nice old school-notebook feel and an aged textured finish to the print.

I (as I imagine most users do) use a collection of interfaces to access twitter throughout the day and week. At work I use the web UI, on the go I use mobile app, and at home I use the iPad app. Sometimes TweetDeck (for Chrome). Sometimes Buffer.

Native UI vs 3rd party

I always used to use 3rd party apps (mostly Tweetdeck) to access twitter but found myself of late gravitating more towards the web interface as it has gradually improved. For such a long time it was the service rather than the interface that was the appeal, allowing the 3rd party clients market to thrive. I believe the tables are starting to turn now twitter is both stable and improving its experience all the time. I also found as my twitter activity grew I found the multi column approach with dynamically updating feed that Tweetdeck offers too much to take in. I started preferring a timed stints approach of allowing myself access for short periods of time during the day. I liked the idea of picking up where I left off and slowly realised it’s not the end of the world if some tweets slipped by unread.

Although I may reflect upon features of some 3rd party apps as nice additions, I’ll focus mainly on the native twitter UI’s for this analysis. Follows a critique identifying everything that annoys me day-to-day using twitter across it’s variety of interfaces.

How twitter could be further improved

Account switching

The mobile apps have account switching, within a few taps via your account page you can switch to any number of multiple accounts you run. This could be further improved by allowing easy account switching directly from the main timeline by tapping on the Twitter icon in the reader bar.

The existing quick profile switching while composing a tweet (accessed by tapping the account name in the header to access a list) is especially useful. Admittedly it’s harder to log out of and back into a mobile app than a webpage, but why don’t we have this feature included in the web UI? Other 3rd party apps manage multiple accounts better, but thats what many are specifically designed to do. Makes perfect sense for the twitter web UI to add fast account switching (much like the updated google account bar), or perhaps some way of blending multiple feeds into a single experience.

The simplest solution I can think of would be to add a ‘Switch account’ link in the existing account menu, launching a small overlay or side-menu allowing account selection.

Who follows who?

There is currently an inconsistent solution to identifying if a user follows you or not. The mobile interfaces do nothing to indicate this, however the web UI does. It a useful feature that should be carried over to all interfaces.

Search

Twitter search is not great and has always been something other tools are superior at performing. With the recent UI updates it has improved significantly. But what I can’t do is search my own data. I want to be able to keyword search my own tweets, as well as search those I follow and those who follow me. As so many people use handles that are not their name, when trying to mention someone it’s often difficult to remember what they’re called. A simple search field in the followers list would remedy this issue, ideally with results generated/filtered below as you typed.

Also the whizzy @ list that allows quick user selection as you compose does not behave with much consistency. Sometimes it is able to find user I do follow (and remember their handles), other times it completely fails to do so?

While we’re on the subject of finding those who I follow/follow me, in the web UI this is presented as scroll-loading page. 20 users per load. Because of this I have at times exhausted my access allowance on twitter trying to load everyone by scrolling down, loading this page over 20 times in order to generate the complete list. This is just crazy. Load everyone at once or present normal pagination with a ‘show all’ link.

Other UI additions

Other things I could see being useful additions to the mobile app might be better thumb control for the phone app. One-handed browsing is common, so a ‘back/side swipe’ rather than top left button to return to previous screen would be a useful addition.

Mac desktop app

The twitter desktop app is far too basic, does little well, and is frustrating to use. I won’t dwell as this topic could turn into a post unto itself, and it’d take a lot of work devise a suitable replacement concept. Another time…

What twitter does well now

Can’t end this post without pointing out how great twitter really is and how far it has come in the past year. So below are a couple of really amazing interface additions for carrying UI’s that are very welcome additions.

Search

As I mentioned before search has improved a lot. Separating the people and tweets search although might seems confusing at first makes a lot of sense as the results they produce are very different. The way the default search changes for both the ‘Connect’ and ‘Discover’ areas works as once you’re in the results area you can quickly switch form one set of results to the other. This does away for the need to have a separate ‘Search’ section as previously found on the mobile interfaces.

Tweet stream

Greatly improved for the mobile app. The mobile app design has always loaded only the recent tweets, leaving a /torn effect/ gap representing the time gap between the last load and the new tweets. Tweets that fell into that gap were forever missed, but now there’s the option to load more tweets in timed stints to fill those gaps, meaning should you desire you never need miss a single tweet.

Overall twitter UI design

Since the update the overall design of both the mobile app and the web UI have improved (although we’re still waiting for a similar update to follow for the iPad app design). It does take a little getting used to and I still struggle to find the post field on the rare occasions I submit a post through the web UI. But overall I think the team at twitter have done amazingly well, and we hope to see them continue to develop the UI and features set (to possibly include some suggestions above?) and grow the service into an ever more useful and wonderful social network.

Download the New Twitter GUI PSD for free.

What are your favourite UI features and gripes with Twitter? Keen to hear everyones thoughts and ideas for future improvements.