Sneak preview on interface improvements

Today we updated the application with optional reply viewing in the interface. This required some changes to our technique, so it took some more time as expected.

We’ve been playing around with the new interface design already. Here is a sneak preview of it.

These are the biggest changes:

• We removed the pink headers of the boxes. We did this in advance of implementing the user avatars. Displaying all the avatars on bright pink didn’t sound like a good idea.
• Normal tabs now have the bright pink color. In the future you can choose to have tabs with #hashtag names. These will become bright yellow.
• We added three tabs to the interface called: ‘Your followers’, DMs and Replies. Your followers will show a list of your followers and allow you to add them to tabs directly. The other two tabs will show you your replies and DM’s from Twitter.
• Right below the tabs we now have placed some action items. On the right we see: ‘Post update’ and ‘Send DM’. They speak for themselves. On the left we have ‘Add People’, ‘Share dashboard’ and ‘Delete this Dashboard’. Add people will be a little menu that collapses and show a tiny menu to allow you to add a new box for a user or hashtag. ‘Share dashboard’ allows you to share a dashboard with the public, for example when you created one for your event. ‘Delete dashboard’ will delete the dashboard your viewing.

We aim to launch the new interface tomorrow, depending on what we will implement. Some research on the Twitter API showed that implementing replies and DM’s in a convenient way takes longer than a day. So first we will do the interface improvements like avatars, clickable names, etc.

We love to hear your feedback on these changes to the interface. Also we’ve uploaded a sketch of the ‘Your follower’ tab to our Flickr account page. If you have feedback, please let us know.