Design Study: Reader Dashboard

[DeadSuperHero]

Reader Dashboard

Some current design ideas being played with involve a dashboard view that splits up a stream for subscriptions and the page view itself. Here's a simple mockup that lives in the /dashboard route of the server.

Subscription List

All in all, not bad. The subscription list is basically a specially-rendered feed that only shows metadata fields about the article itself. In this case, a title, thumbnail, author, publication, and tags. Clicking any of these will set the article view in the second pane.

There are still a few questions about the reader feed itself. Currently there's some assumption that it would be chronologically ordered, not affected by boost, and only shows content from people you're subscribed to. Currently I'm on the fence about adding buttons or tabs to represent different lists. A few possible list types might be:

• Trending
• Subscriptions
• Collections - filtered lists containing only specific authors/publications

Actions

Might be nice to introduce likes and like counts, and maybe a comment counter as well. I don't really want to overpopulate the average entry with too many elements, though. In some ways, it might make more sense for actions to actually live within the reader view itself, to be accessed when reading.

Search Integration

In addition, one design aspect being explored is the implementation of a search bar at the top of the column. Searching for title, author, or tags would automatically re-populate the items in the reader list to show available results that are known about. The goal is to make discovery easy using a minimal amount of clicks while traveling the shortest distance around the screen.

White Space - Third column

The far right side of the page currently is one big blank spot. This is probably the least realized part of the design layout so far; on one hand, it would be nice to show a card with author information, or three other related works that might be interesting. I've also debated just putting the comments section there.
None of these things quite feel 100% right yet, so more experiments are necessary.