In late December we teamed up with the design and usability experts from Zurb in order to find the best reading interface for the new favit – update codename: “Avalon“.
The first thing the guys from Zurb noticed about favit is that it has so many powerful features and it is difficult to explain them. Even geeks got lost in finding, grasping, and spreading all those features in their communities. In fact, the most important feedback and ideas we’ve received from the Zurb team was:
“Why don’t you merge all those features into one powerful and easy to understand?”
The next simple, yet brilliant question was:
“Why the lifestream (people and groups) and subscriptions are in different services. Can we put them together?”
This one struck us as a lightning – there was no logical explanation as to why we had them that way… We believed (like geeks do) that the Subscriptions (blogs and site feeds) should be separated from the user’s activities across the various social networks. But why?
Working closely with Zurb we created a new feature in favit – the Social Streams – a tab like structure where every user can decide which friends and subscriptions to include. The streams can behave both as lists and as powerful interest based filters that every user can configure and edit easily, at anytime. All streams are shareable – and everyone can subscribe to streams shared by others – sharing is caring!
One of the new great features in the upcoming streams is that they can be browsed by the type of media they contain – Photos, Videos, etc. Every user can decide how the information in the stream will be displayed – weather it should be ordered chronologically (based on the time of sharing) or by the network activity (based on comments, likes and reshares). This feature is also one of the most controversial – in the current favit your lifestream gets rearranged based on your networks activity. In this way stories that your friends consider important keep popping on top of your stream. But, as Robert Scoble has said several times – the ability to decide how the stream should behave is crucial. BTW – most of the requests that Robert addresses in this post have already been integrated in favit Avalon.
Once we agreed on those new elements and features, our team took over from Zurb and went developing the application that will blow everybody’s mind. We analyzed how people read and interact with information and created an interface that will enable every user to fully enjoy his social media stream.
Be among the first to peek into the new favit – it will be divided in two parts – a Notification stream and a Reading window. In this way you can read undisturbed an interesting article and in the same time keep track of your friends’ content stream, status updates, etc. Our real-time engine will make sure that all blog posts, shared items, likes and comments arrive in your stream the second the user publishes them.
Working with Zurb helped us a lot and we’re very pleased with the way they Jeremy, Roeland and Tanya embraced the project, opened our eyes, and helped us focus on the user experience and optimize the logic that lays in the basis of our core product.
More features and upcoming changes will be revealed shortly. Keep an eye on our blog as we prepare the launch of the Avalon version of favit!
