More Connect UI Mockups, Do You Care?

If you’ve been away, welcome back, and by the way, I’ve been blogging our design process for the changes we need to make to support OpenSocial in Connect.

Today, Rich posted a few new mockups today of his vision for our Connect (and ultimately, Mix) OpenSocial UI.

The first mockup shows Rich’s vision for the OpenSocial app detail page.

This is the page you’ll see if you click on an app summary in the app directory or if you see in your Activity Log that someone in your network has installed an app and you decide to click through to get more information. We may even show installed apps on each person’s profile, in which case, you’d see this page if you clicked through on the link.

Rich also finished a mockup of the canvas view that will be available to developers and users. We plan to offer developers the ability to build a canvas view of their app/s; this view is essentially the large version of an app. If you use iGoogle and have the sandbox view enabled, you can see what I mean.

Basically, the canvas view allows for more features and functionality to be surfaced because the developer isn’t constrained to a small, widget-sized area. More real estate means more features for apps.

If you’re savvy to the platform, you’ll notice we will eventually be removing ideas (and answers) from the core platform and redeploying them as OpenSocial apps. This serves a few purposes:

It allows ideas and questions to be portable to any OpenSocial container, preserving all the information we’ve collected so far.
It allows people to customize their Connect (and Mix) experience, i.e. if you don’t use ideas or answers, you can remove them.
It allows other developers to extend the functionality of ideas to include specific features that they want, e.g. idea status and lifecycle management.

So, what do you think? Once Rich is done with his mockups, we’re off to development. This is your chance to influence the direction of Connect and Mix, so why no spead a few minutes thinking critically about the design?

I like to involve new people in design because as the people in charge of caring and feeding for Connect/Mix, we tend to be too close to the problem. I find that new blood, opinions and ideas are often what you need to break out of a funk or to make really important strides.

Find the comments and help us design the future. Seriously.

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