Develop Diaspora* Design and Identity

Pablo Cúbico Public Seen by 183

> Was: Diaspora UI enhancements with minimum coding effort

Hi people!

I'm new here, I was starting an experiment with Diaspora UI, just by doing minor enhancements with little or no coding, just CSS/HTML, not breaking any JS logic or backend work.

I started a mockup and it turned out pretty nice, so I thought: what if I turn that into a proposal?

I hope you like it! But if you hate it, don't hesitate to say so... I may do it on a fork for fun anyway! :P

Strategy, time, resources, etc.

Details on the proposal are here:

http://piratepad.net/diaspora-ui-proposal

Feel free to edit, add, etc.

Mockup

Mockup is here, click "Comments" on the bottom, or press "C", you will see some pink comment bubbles. Feel free to comment there also:

http://invis.io/X3RBEAQA

Thanks for your time!

You can find me at [email protected]

Sean Tilley Tue 8 Apr 2014 10:51PM

There's a lot in here that I like. I also feel that Diaspora could use a little bit more visual polish, but as others have said before me, first we must get everything set up on BootStrap.

Pablo Cúbico Wed 9 Apr 2014 5:18PM

I just setup my environment to start contributing to the bootstrap porting in process.

Besides that: what do you guys think about this "minimum effort" strategy of doing polishing without changing the layout. The benefits are:

It's faster than actually changing the layout
Won't alter the existing flow for current users
Won't affect any possible underlying JS (won't break anything)
Will put Diaspora in another level, better looks could lead to more engagement both for users and devs.
Less discussion needed (except for a few new minor features, like choosing your own background).

Sad reality is, that the common user don't care about the backend, if it's Ruby/Rails or Python/Django or whatever, they will feel more engaged if we present a polished UI.

To achieve that, I would use InvisionApp (the one on the mockup link), which I currently use for my UX work with clients, it's just a bunch a JPGs with clickable areas, and I can do some "interactive" mockups in top of the preexisting bootstrap layout.

InvisionApp lets us all comment and discuss mockups before implementing, it's a real time saver.

We all agree on the porting to Bootstrap side, it's mandatory, so let me know what you think about the approach, and we can start thinking on doing some serious UI refinement other than updating the CSS framework.

Jason Robinson Tue 22 Apr 2014 7:12PM

Awesome @hola nice to have a UX guy here - that mockup looks totally awesome. It would be nice to have mockups on big changes - and I think we've been slowly going in that direction, just with less bling-bling ;)

Welcome aboard!