This is where KCCO Pro comes in. Let's get started:
KCCO Pro
Description
KCCO Pro is an unofficial theChive gallery viewer used to procrastinate more effectively, if that isn't an oxymoron. It offers all of the photo blog's famous content in a pocketable format and is meant to close the gap (no pun intended) between your awesome phone and their awesome site, which they were not capable to do on their own. It's free to download and ad-supported. There is an in-app purchase to remove the ads.The Play Store listing
The app icon is square and contains KCCO. I don't know about this. Certainly square is muuuuch better than being square with rounded edges and glossy effect, like all those wanna-be iPhone apps on the Play Store have, but it is also not particularly distinctive. Maybe using the crown from the O would be more unique. Do I really need part of the app name in the icon? No, if you think that is necessary, at least add the full name to establish your branding, put a tiny "Pro" underneath the KCCO. Not only will this give the full app name, the phrase "Pro" is also utterly positive. It adds value and gives the impression of a paid app, even though it's free.
The feature graphic is nice. The font size is ideal, non-intrusive, but still readable on smaller phones. I'm not a big fan of adding screenshots to the feature graphic but in this case with the tilted phone, it seems to work. After all, what else are you gonna put there? Can't put actual posts there, can't put trademarked logos there.
The green gradient is subtle and stylish. The phone's shadow adds to that. Maybe a tiny bit of structure or texture in the green would be nice. Also, it might be my eyes or my screen but the green in the icon and the green in the feature graphic seem very slightly different, like the app icon is more yellow-y. maybe measure the colour values and make sure your colouring is consistent.The description could be a little subtler, it seems to scream at me. The header "Features" is highlighted by 6 plus signs on each side, unnecessary, make it bold, or add an empty line above and it will stand out. The checkmarks in the feature list also have very thick lines and look a bit more like square roots than actual checkmarks. maybe a simple dash or asterisk could point out there is a list just as well. The last point in the feature list is "GIF SUPPORT!!" In this exact form, this is uncalled for. Not only does the horrible official app have gif support as well, any news reader like feedly, the stock browser and Chrome all display gifs on theChive's mobile site on your phone, no reason to shout.
Infinite Scrolling, pull to refresh, ads and the gallery's post date are not exactly features, they are design choices you made and do not necessarily need to be in the list. As an experienced user, I will see that in the screenshots or when I have it installed, as a novice user I don't care or don't understand.
Directly underneath the feature list you put "(No commenting support)". At this point I am not sure, do you want to tell me, you don't give support via comments on Play Store ratings? Do you want to tell me, I can't comment on Chive posts from within the app? In the first case, remove that phrase, all developers can reply to Play Store ratings and you should do that as well, while thanking users for 5-Star ratings doesn't do much, answering 1-Star rants calmly and competently, explaining why it could come to an issue for that particular user or telling other users that said bug has since been fixed is a huge message for people browsing through the ratings. If it is the second case (i.e. commenting on posts in the app), still remove the phrase. Never admit defeat. At least alter it to say it is planned for a future version or say it is impossible due to technical reasons. You don't want to look lazy or incompetent for something that probably isn't your fault.
The next paragraph "This app will kill your data plan" etc. is great. It describes what the app actually does, what theChive is and why the user would want this app. Unfortunately, it is so far down in your description, that most users won't even read it, as they have to expand the description, both on the phone or the web and people don't do that for apps they know nothing about. This paragraph has to be right at the top. First, the user has to know, what this is and why they want it, then explain, why you made it, then tell them what this can do better than the original. The people who already know theChive will expand the description to find out, what distinguishes this app from the competition.
The last paragraph explains the permissions, which is awesome. More developers should do that. It gives the inexperienced user a feeling of security, knowing that you are not invading their privacy, but the permissions actually do something. Nice. In case you use Analytics or in fact, do collect any kind of data from the app, you should link a privacy policy in the Play Store listing.
Wow, that was a long paragraph, but it is a long Play Store listing, which can use a lot of minor tweaks in my opinion. Overall, everything is there, just the structure is a little off. Let's move on, we haven't even began to talk about the app yet.
The app itself
After first starting the app, I am greeted with a changelog.
- This is version 1.0.0. As a developer myself, I understand the urge to brag. You want to tell the user "Look, I put a lot of work into this to make it work and to make it awesome!" but the truth is, the user doesn't care, if you put 2 hours or 200 hours into it, they want to get to the content and explaining, there were actually versions before 1.0.0 isn't necessary.
- This is my first installation of the app. There is no change for me, since it wasn't an update for me, so I don't care about past bugs, previous users had to fight with, if they are gone, take me to the app.
- If it were an update for me, my Play Store app would inform me about this, then I'd see the Play Store listing on my phone, where the first thing I see is the "What's new" section. If I care about what has changed, I can read it there before I even update the app, if I don't, I don't and don't want to be bothered by the changelog in the app either.
- If there were any significant updates changing the navigation or something really fundamental, you can use a tutorial or a sneak peak to introduce the user to the new features. Telling them there is a 3-dot button now doesn't help, they can see that. The same goes for double tap to zoom, for instance. Instead of presenting that in a boring changelog, maybe show a toast notification, when the first picture is shown full screen. And once the user double tapped an image, never show that toast again.
Afterwards, I find myself in the app, no tutorial. I really like that you don't provide a tutorial. You used pretty standard navigation for the app and that is self explanatory. This is great. It's better to use a simple and standard design that doesn't require a tutorial, than re-inventing the wheel and then having to explain everything to the user.
There are several minor issues with this landing screen. First, when you pull to refresh, then release, eventually this "Done, Chive On!" message will appear at the top, every single time. It's nice and funny the first time, maybe even the 5th time, but after that it gets annoying. Every time I find myself not clicking anything, until it goes away. Somehow, subconsciously, I feel like I couldn't click the first article's headline, if the headline was any shorter as it would disappear behind the "Done, Chive On!" notification. I know that these big cards are clickable all over, but I just sit there and wait nonetheless.
Another thing is the Actionbar. From left to right: The Up affordance is non standard. Since you use a sliding menu drawer, you could use the "burger" icon, i.e. the 3-line navigation drawer icon to imply, there is something to the left, whereas most people will associate the Up affordance as navigating away to a higher level. Having the wide logo there instead of the square app icon (much like YouTube does it) is great. The "Latest" next to it should be lowered if possible, or the font size should be adjusted until it looks centered. I love that you used the Split ActionBar to make use of available space to provide several frequently used actions. Forcing a 3-dot ActionBar Overflow even on devices with a physical menu button and not breaking the menu button is great. Many people, including me, like that. Having dividers between the actions is not necessary, but looks nice.
In the light theme, you use cards and in the dark theme, it looks more like a list, this means, the photo previews are not the same size! In the light theme, you should remove the padding around the pictures and make them touch the top, bottom and left borders of the cards. This gives a flatter design, more consistent with the Design Guidelines. There also seems to be a lot of space around the post date for every post I have seen so far. Why not add the post time, so users, who come back more than once a day have some orientation what they missed.
In gallery view, you have no borders around the pictures, which is awesome. I'm not sure, what that grey box with the X is that pops up from time to time. It never displays anything for me. I like how the ActionBar changes to provide actions relevant to the gallery, like the favourites star. You used the standard implementation, which I appreciate, but since the star icon fills up, once you click it, the pseudo toast notifications at the top like "added to favorites" and "removed from favorites" are uncalled for. If you feel the absolute need to display these, first of all translate the string "favorites" into british english as well as "favourites" and lose the colours. Blue, if added and red, if removed doesn't make much sense, it feels like removing something from the favourites causes a problem or is the wrong thing to do, while, in fact, it is easily reversible. Having access to the settings from everywhere through the overflow is good, soliciting people to remove the ads from everywhere is not. Put that in one or two central spots and call it a day.
Opening an image is when your app really comes to shine. You offer the name of the gallery, the position like 1 of 80 and five relevant actions. This is where the Split ActionBar is really necessary. The iconography is clean, simple and self-explanatory, you included tooltips for visually impaired people, which in this case helped my figure out, why there are 2 share actions. The "Share this Photo" action is probably my favourite feature of the entire app. While many others would look up the photo url and share that, this app actually downloads the photo and calls the share intent afterwards. Let's say I want to send a picture over Hangouts, a link only annoys the other person, sending the picture directly is more convenient for the recipient, but also spares me the troubles of first saving the picture and then going through the Android Gallery to share it. Not having to leave the app for such a feature really improves user engagement.
The sliding menu drawer is well structured, maybe the list is a little too long, it might, MIGHT, be a nice idea to make the categories like "Funny", "Girls", "Random" and "Tech" collapsible. Also, using a sliding menu drawer instead of a navigation drawer is debatable. It might be a better experience on a tablet, on a phone it is not necessarily the better or more obvious choice. The font size could be slightly decreased as well.
This is a weird bug that I encountered once and was lucky to snap a screenshot of. The background and list was fixed and another transparent version of the list was lying on top, being scrollable. While I might not be able to recreate the bug now and am still uncertain, what caused it, it is certainly something that would not happen with the standard implementation. Through the support library, the navigation drawer should be available for every device that is currently compatible with your app, although I am not sure, if it plays nice with Actionbarsherlock.
For me, the settings activity is the ass that knocks over what the hands built up. Where is all the nice branding gone? Suddenly it is in the default Holo theme?
It's great that you offer themes. That is surely more work that to simple hard-code the theme into the manifest. Please keep in mind the comment on the difference in photo size in the overview, I mentioned earlier. Certainly the prettiest look is the "Large Images" theme, although technically not a theme but a different layout. The overlay of text over the images is reeeally good, but the padding between the cards in this layout looks slightly different from the padding in the other layouts. Make sure to measure all your themes for consistency. Offering to clear cache from within the app is a nice touch. The default directory for saving images should not be the sdcard root. You should set that to a subdirectory like "KCCO", but only create the folder, once the first picture is exported. The sdcard root only creates clutter on the user's phone.
I can't, for the life of me, figure out, what "Disable Captions" is supposed to mean. I looked all over the place, but whether it is checked or not does not seem to make a difference. Unfortunately, it is the only item in this list that does not have a description.
I sincerely hope, you use inexact alarms for the notifications but either way, I suspect a real battery killer right there. Maybe in the future, this could work with GCM triggered through RSS on the server side. If you use real regular 20 minute intervals like the app suggests at first glance, have a look at Reto Meier's talks from the last 3 Google I/O conferences, where he talks a lot about this topic.
Me, me, me, me, me. Surely, I would expect the in-app purchase to remove the ads in the settings, but this long list of features that entirely revolve about you are not settings. Make it an "About" screen or put an email support button somewhere.
Listing included open source libraries, while technically not necessary and entirely uninteresting to the average user, is nice. Giving credit is important.
The Up affordance in the settings brings me back exactly where I came from. In fact, all over the app, I can't find a single occurrence, where the Up affordance doesn't do exactly the same thing as the Back button. This is weird. Up is not the same as Back. This guide from the Guidelines displays the differences between Back and Up and in most cases, I would suggest you use Up to actually go to a hierarchical parent, i.e. the main gallery view.
Conclusion
Wherever the app complies with the Android Design Guidelines, it is perfect, wherever it tries to distance itself from the guidelines, something goes wrong. The layout of the app is perfect, the navigation needs a bit of work. In some instances, the eye for the details seems to have gotten lost, surely a minor flaw that was caused by focussing on more important things and making them awesome.
This app is so close to perfect, it almost hurts to see it fail in some details. It is so intuitive and a wonderful way to browse content of a wonderful site and makes it easier to save and share content than any other app I have come across. If you read this review as a user, not the developer it was intended for, this app is by far the BEST way to browse theChive on your phone. With just little room for improvement, I give Version 1.0.0 a final rating of
4.9 / 5
Update:
I would suggest, after having read a post, you grey out the front image of the post and/or make the title Italic, so people know, what post they read last. Posts that are new to the user, i.e. appeared since they last opened the app could also be in Bold font to highlight. Swiping away posts to dismiss would also be a nice addition.
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