Path released version 2.0 of their iOS app today and people, including myself, are loving how good that piece of software is, here's a good article on it: "[Going down the right Path](http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/going-down-the- right-path/)".
I've already expressed my feelings on twitter: "really, really sweet app but not sure how often I'll use the service."
While I tested the app I also took note of a couple of things that could perhaps be improved, they are:
Signup
Not the whole signup process, just one of the screens in it, the one where you have to choose between creating or logging in to an existing account:
I hesitated a bit on this screen before choosing 'New Path', there are 2 reasons for that hesitation:
- Path does a great thing first time you start it, it gives you instant gratification by landing you on a sample timeline, that's cool but it also switches the context from registration to interacting with the Path app. In this context, it's not surprising that a dialog that offers you to choose from 'New Path' and 'Existing Path' may not be immediately associated with the account creation workflow.
- Besides pushing the brand onto you, which is fine, it deviates from the normal signup/login wording.
Personally, I'd stick with one of these:
- Register your Path / Login to Path
- Signup to Path / Login to Path
- Signup / Login
Feedback
This is most likely a bug, but when viewing certain content in the app, there's no visual feedback whatsoever of loading activity.
In the above screen shot, the app is loading the cover picture (currently linen), and the user timeline, the username wasn't visible as soon as I opened the profile either.
Timestamps
They, are, gorgeous.
The tiny clock animated between values, drool.
The only remark I have is regarding their visibility and appearance.
- visibility: easily covered by your finger while scrolling
- appearance: it's very close to a drag handle, popular on Android apps (Quick Scroll), not so much on iOS I believe, the fact that I was an Android user for years may have some impact on this perception.
As @gt points out in his article, they realised the timestamp can be pushed out of the stage and give the content full highlight instead.
That's cool, but perhaps there's another way to do it, if you look at the screen shot above, some of the updates do contain a humanised timestamp, I would suggest to have it always in, but heavily faded out or completely hidden, and bring them into the stage by giving them more contrast when scrolling.
Exact timestamps could be made visible when viewing a single update, and display a more loose timestamp in the timeline.
Another solution that would make it look less like a drag handle would be to display it in a fixed position hovering on top of the timeline for example.
Yet another solution would be to present the bubble on the opposite half of the screen where the finger is pressing, would loose association with scroll position but would minimize the chances of being hidden by the finger.
Swipe Navigation Consistency
Reminiscent of the Twitter for iPad app, Path offers swipe navigation, like so:
On the app home screen you can swipe to the right to reveal the main app navigation, and swipe to the left to view your friends list.
Very cool, they made it optional by providing button fallbacks and use animations to suggest you're able to perform this task.
The problem here is that the same animation is present in other screens of the app leading you in mistake that you can perform a swipe gesture to get back to where you were.
There are a couple of occasions where it's specially misleading, most blatant one I found was when viewing a user profile:
home -> friends list -> user profile
the animation suggested I could go back to my friends list by swiping to the right, but besides not yielding any result, the fallback button took me to the home screen with an animation that suggested a navigation stack similar to:
home <- friends list <- user profile
By performing a swipe to the left I was taken to the friends list:
home -> friends list
Pull to Refresh
Sadly not implemented.
Conclusion
Would prefer not to repeat myself, but I have to say that this is a very well designed app, with high quality finishes to it, lovely textures, feels very solid, and the swipe gestures make the home screen feel very different from the rest of the apps, it actually feels physical rather than a bunch of screens joined together by meaningless animations.
I'm actually pretty happy I could find these small details I think that could be improved, always a good exercise.
Congrats on the Path team for their great work and curious to see how much traction the service will gain.