A favorite part of my daily routine is sitting down with a nice cup of java and scanning the mornings news. Feedly has helped me stay informed for a long time now. It is fast, intuitive and gives me what I want when I want it. It is, at least in my opinion, one of the more aesthetically pleasing news readers on the Android Play Store today. But Feedly is poised to get a facelift using Google’s Material Design guidelines that Feedly’s design co-founder Arthur Bodolec feels is a “..solid step in the right direction.”
Arthur Bodolec outlines some of the new design elements on his Medium page (source link below). His main goal was to create a new version of Feedly that would give their team a new direction in design for new releases of the application. He also wanted to receive feedback on the designs from the Feedly community. He also shared some of the finer points of the design, offering us a peek at what may be in store for the app in terms of the new Material Design, and his motivations for taking such actions.
Arthur took a look at four of Google’s core principals to guide the redesign process. He started with tangible interfaces. Google stated that they layout should be akin to a sheet of paper where each pixel resides on its own sheet of paper that can be moved and resized to serve a multitude of purposes. Arthur noted that Feedly follows a similar concept, as Feedly is sort of like a deck of cards. This allows users to swipe through cards to explore the articles in their feed. Navigation panels move in front of the deck from the left or right side, and then slide back out of the way when the user is finished.
The second aspect of Material Design Arthur Bodolec took a look at print-like design. Arthur made adjustments to the various side drawers and magazine view to bringing more consistency to the design. He also made some color changes as part of the guidelines for print-like design. While Google recommends that the primary color of the application should be used to form the colors of the toolbars and status bars, Arthur felt that using Feedly’s bright green would distract the user, and instead opted for a light grey to, “create a less intrusive toolbar.” He instead used Feedly’s bright green to highlight the trending topic of the day, bringing emphasis to this information. Arthur also made use of full bleed images in magazine view as well as the header for the topic that has been selected in the explore panel.
The third aspect Arthur took a look at was the transitions. Transition is an important aspect of Feedly as you move through the article list and then on to the article view where the article is showcased. To do this, he followed 3 main recommendations set by Google to create this effect. First up is the Touch Ripple effect which Arthur uses when the user interacts with the article such as closing out the article. He then added visual continuity in the form of image scaling. This allows the user to draw a relationship between what is touch and the end product. Finally, he utilized tangible surfaces. This is what creates the effect of the preview image lifting up and fading into the full article.
The last element, Adaptive design, is something that Feedly has done all along. This is the concept that content must work on all devices that are of different size and shape. Arthur points out that this allows for different layouts on various size devices which Material Design executes in different and interesting ways.
It is clear that Feedly is set to release a beautiful new app with Googles latest Material Design. This is exciting as it will make an already beautiful application even more impressive. It is clear from the pictures that Arthur has put in a lot of work to make our morning news routines more relaxing and pleasing to look at. He did not state a time as to when this new design would launch, but hopefully it will not be too long. Until now we will just have to wait to see what Arthur and his friends at Feedly put out.
