Previously:
- The Anatomy of an RSS Reader (Part 1)
- Why I’m Building My Next App in Public (Part 2)
- Why I’m Building My Next App in Public (Part 1)
Management
Consuming content on the internet, in general, can be an overwhelming experience. There’s often more content to read, watch and listen to, than there are hours in the day. And many services compete very hard for your attention.
For example, I’ve often struggled with YouTube. There are channels I would ordinarily subscribe to, but they publish too many videos, and it floods by “Subscriptions” list. The only tool that YouTube really provides is the “Watch Later” list, but that is just a flat list (which is, mercifully, reorder-able). Ideally, I would like to be able to subscribe to certain playlists from certain channels.
I think many, if not most, of us need more from our apps to help us organize and triage our content. I think we’ve all been guilty of accumulating content to consume, of one type or another, and when that list gets too long, we simply declare bankruptcy and delete-all.
RSS apps have traditionally offered one of two tools, and sometimes both: folders and tags. These are useful features that users are familiar with. Sometimes, though, these are just tools for organizing subscriptions, and don’t also act as lists. In other words, can I select a folder and view an amalgamated list of the contents of the subscriptions contained in the folder? The same goes for tags.
Some RSS apps offer pins. Pinning content to the top of, say, the home screen is a small, but powerful feature that allows users to feel as though they are moving quicker through an app, and not being slowed down by a cumbersome user-interface. Ideally, not just subscriptions should be pinnable. Why not folders and tags, for example?
Depending on the UI-paradigm, it is often common in RSS apps to have lists, like an inbox, where all content is viewable, by default. It is less common, for instance, to be able to explicitly exclude certain subscriptions from the inbox. As per my YouTube dilemma, that can stop us from subscribing to certain feeds that post dozens of items per day, like news organizations. If we were to look at web browsers and email clients, there are many other kinds of lists that may be useful: bookmarks, favorites, reading list, history, archive, trash?
This brings us to another question. Is there a better way to deal with high-volume feeds? If we are using the concept of an inbox, it often means that the user must delete items once finished. With high-volume feeds that can be burdensome. It would be ideal to not have to manage those feeds. Instead of deleting items once done, perhaps, automatically remove them once they are removed from the feed? So, we can dip in and out of those feeds when we choose, and we’re not left with the task of cleaning up the mess left by these noisy subscriptions.
Filters are a powerful tool, often found in email clients. They give the user the ability to perform tasks on items, automatically, at the point they’re ingested by the app. If you like to read all items by a certain author, in a given feed, it would be quite useful to automatically move all those items to your reading list, for example. Automation features, in general, if user-friendly, can be an extremely powerful tool for combating information overload, by offloading some work from the user to the app.
While not an automation feature per-se, the ability to mute content, is another powerful tool for combating information overload. But also, perhaps, a mental health tool. In the highly politicised times we live in, for example, it can be important to limit, at times, your visibility to certain content. On a lighter note, muting can also help to avoid spoilers for that tv show you haven’t started watching yet, or to avoid the results of the weekend’s F1 race.
And, So
The features discussed here are a subset of everything that could be implemented in an RSS reader. Again, I’m drawn to the question of to what extent it’s possible to include every feature imaginable, to satisfy a broad range of users, within a simple and graceful UI / UX.
I wouldn’t want to, for example, cram fistfuls of features into settings screens, but, we then must come up with extensible design patterns that allow features to be right where you need them when you need them and not there when you don’t.
In part 3, we’ll look at Reading.