Redesigning Reddit’s AMA app

A quick attempt at solving some issues

Hello! Recently, reddit released their official AMA app for iOS and Android. I couldn’t help myself but to share few things I tried to fix it.

Brand

I think the reddit brand is diluted in the app. Colour palette is off and the reddit alien gives out a glimpse just while loading.

These are the colours used in AMA app. As you can see, it seems to be a random choice and not in-line with reddit.com

Here’s how reddit looks in it’s very basic form. I think the only common colour used in the app is bright orange.

Function

1. Cryptic category icons taking up space but not delivering any value
2. Complicated background making difficult to read the text
3. What are these? buttons for ants?
4. Hidden menu for selection. it could be upfront.
5. Total height of each list unit is too much. Also, didn’t we just hide top menu to save height?
6. What happened to good ol’ reddit alien? we already have a logo people!

1. Oops, status bar has disappeared and the titlebar doesn’t have a title
2. Fireworks?
3. Again, tiny buttons for important actions
4. The rounded font is the only styling similarity I found in the whole app. Though this could be better, I will come to that.

Here it is

I wanted a very basic and mature style to the app. The iconic way of showing a post on reddit had to continue on this platform.

Link to full size mocks →

Home

1. The options to choose type of AMA are upfront.
2. Easy to read post titles and big enough action items to downvote or upvote
3. Tap on the alien to open the AMA categories sliding menu. see below.

AMA screen

1. Post karma on titlebar along with share button.
2. Clean masthead
3. Verified/Unverified tag, easy to spot the status of OP
4. Quick “Ask Question” Bar at the bottom. Tap on it to send in your question, as easy as sending a message.

Upcoming AMAs

While working on it, I thought “Upcoming AMAs” would make a really good addition to the features. I always look forward to certain AMAs that are coming up. Also contextual action of adding a reminder for the AMA so you will never miss the one you want.

Categories

Reddit introduced something called “AMA categories” along with this. Reading through this grid of large icons, small uppercase font is very painful. It’s difficult to scan names in grid than a list. Why not nice big names and better icons?

Clean and easy to read names, and you actually know the one you have selected. These wonderful icons are designed by the folks at icons8.com

Thoughts behind

Colours

I started out with the original colour palette, a lot of brand recall comes from the colours.

Fonts & Icons

After looking for a rounded font to go with the reddit logo, I came across Nunito on Google fonts. It is rounded as I wanted, characters are squarish and not tall. It renders nicely on smaller sizes and has three weights.

Nunito is been used only in two sizes throughout the app. iOS’s standard 17px for large and 13px for small.

I designed some of the basic icons needed. They compliment the font with their rounded corners. The up-vote and down-vote are the smoother versions of the original icons seen on reddit.

App icon

This alien was designed by /u/thewordkurt over at /r/design few months ago.

What’s next?

As I mentioned, these are quick attempts of solving some of the issues, I will be detailing out every aspect of this. I have even started building out some of the parts in X-Code. The point of this exercise is this product could be better in a lot of ways if given correct direction.

I am really looking forward to feedback and some help to build it. You can reach me at nirzardp [at] gmail