Visual interfaces for visual people
As with most apps, Snapspot has taken a variety of different forms on its journey to 1.0. At first, I used a large and cluttered tile based view, which felt horrible to use. Then I tried a map, which seems nice in principle, but didn’t work for discovery at all. In an effort to make the app more simple, the design retreated to a less visual list based interface.
Lists work great for a lot of things, but as it turns out they don’t work well for a highly visual app like Snapspot. Perhaps the key realization I came to was that in order for the app to be really useful, a user should be able to quickly glance at a screen and get all the information they need to take great photos without having to dig through a ton of menus that only serve to get in your way.
Photographers are highly visual people, so their tools should be too.
One of the main reasons I didn’t want to look into using flashy photo-based cards is that I didn’t want to force users to have to take photos of their spots to add them. I remember one of the very first builds of Snapspot worked in this way, and when I took it out for a test drive the experience was disastrous.
I had a breakthrough when I was looking through the API documentation for Google Maps and realized that I could fetch photos for a massive variety of locations from Google themselves. I decided that these images combined with a simple map render for spots with no images would be a great way to add photos back into the app.
After a weekend of work, I think I’ve come up with a nice solution for making Snapspot visual again. It’s a card-based layout, but an information dense one that spans two columns instead of a single one. Each card has the most helpful at-a-glance information: the spot’s name, distance to you, address, and any tags you may have assigned to it.
Additionally, the cards can be compacted and used in a horizontally scrolling view for showcasing different lists of spots, such as nearby spots, cool spots to explore, promoted spots, and more.
These UI changes will help Snapspot work, look, and feel better, and I can’t wait for you to see them live. Be sure to follow this blog for more development updates like this, as well as http://getsnapspot.com for more information on the project.
