Ideas for improving the app’s look and feel

App
1

Hi everyone,
I’m a big RSS fan and I’d love to share some thoughts on how the app’s look & feel could be improved from my perspective.

I’ve attached an image for reference: on the left you’ll see the current timeline design, and on the right two alternative proposals.

Below is a brief explanation of what I changed.

Changes shared by both versions (New1 & New2)

  • I feel the large blue circles on the left side of the timeline are quite dominant and take up a lot of space. I wanted to reposition or rethink them to rebalance their importance and the overall visual hierarchy of the timeline.

  • The white headline text feels very bright to me. Slightly darkening it could make the interface easier on the eyes, especially in dark mode.

Individual versions

New1
In this version, I moved the blue circles below the website icons. This gives the design more breathing room and makes it feel calmer and more efficient in terms of space usage. The blue circles no longer compete with the favicons in terms of visual hierarchy, but for users who like the dots, they’re still there.

New2
This version is my personal favorite. Here, I removed the blue dots entirely to create a more minimalist feed. Read vs. unread articles are no longer indicated by a blue dot, but instead through dimmed vs. non-dimmed preview text. This makes it immediately clear at a glance which items have already been read.

This is just a small piece of feedback from someone who really enjoys RSS reader apps. I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes, if feedback in this direction isn’t helpful or desired, please feel free to ignore it. If it is useful, I’m a designer and would be happy to offer more support around design and overall look & feel.

Best

Q

nnw_design_feedback
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1 Like
2

I like it, but you should see how this works when you have the larger icon size.

3

I’m not a fan of combining the first 2 columns into 1, since they contain entirely different dimensions of info.

1 Like
4

Thanks! I appreciate the feedback and ideas!

I should mention a couple of our tenets, since these are useful to know when thinking about NetNewsWire UI:

  • We take a lot of our cues from Mail and other Apple apps, on the grounds that apps that look and work in familiar ways are easier to learn and are judged to be more intuitive. (This is especially important when the concept — reading RSS feeds — is still new and strange to many potential users.) We don’t follow these apps 100%, but where we differ we make sure we have a very good reason.
  • We tend to not want to change things. Though we know that some people really like freshness, most users really don’t like change. (And, these days, with all these terrible changes everywhere all the time, it’s nice to have things that don’t change so much.) That’s not to say we won’t make changes — after all, we did just adopt Liquid Glass — but, again, there has to be a very good reason.

I don’t say this to be discouraging but to explain our mindset. It’s likely we’ll be adding more customization features in the future, and some of these kinds of things (such as, for instance, a dim-read-articles setting) could be part of that customization.

2 Likes
5

Assign dim-read-articles to me. As you know, I love text rendering.