“Amazed how many apps borrow the [Facebook] iPhone app’s home screen design. Many of them should probably just use a tab bar, perhaps even Facebook.
Joe Hewitt, creator of the Facebook iPhone app (via TechCrunch)
I can’t seem to find my own, older tweets to this effect to make this a proper “I told you so,” but, suffice to say, I’ve been saying something very similar to this for a long time. While I wouldn’t go quite so far as to suggest no one is ever justified in resorting to the “Springboard within an app” design that Facebook popularized (and which has now been perpetuated in apps like Rdio, LinkedIn, and Google+), I will say that I find it a little “horsey” (to borrow an evocative design critique I’ve heard attributed to Steve Jobs) and it feels like a bit of a cop out to me. I really wonder if most designers could avoid it by striving to think about their app as more of an integrated whole, and less as a series of functional silos. The Facebook app is an exceptional case because it really is like a collection of disparate apps (and on a Facebook-controlled phone would probably be presented as such), but I wonder if the Rdio app, for example, could have done better by taking some cues from the App Store app in it’s architecture.
I can’t seem to find my own, older tweets to this effect to make this a proper “I told you so,” but, suffice to say, I’ve been saying something very similar to this for a long time. While I wouldn’t go quite so far as to suggest no one is ever justified in resorting to the “Springboard within an app” design that Facebook popularized (and which has now been perpetuated in apps like Rdio, LinkedIn, and Google+), I will say that I find it a little “horsey” (to borrow an evocative design critique I’ve heard attributed to Steve Jobs) and it feels like a bit of a cop out to me. I really wonder if most designers could avoid it by striving to think about their app as more of an integrated whole, and less as a series of functional silos. The Facebook app is an exceptional case because it really is like a collection of disparate apps (and on a Facebook-controlled phone would probably be presented as such), but I wonder if the Rdio app, for example, could have done better by taking some cues from the App Store app in it’s architecture.
