Creating a gallery-like experience in a notes app - pt.2

Alright, the final part of this series. If you haven't yet, read part 1 of the series for contextual purposes.

After getting the feature to work, I had to modify the UI. Users will always prefer clicking to swiping and with this in mind I decided to add buttons for this feature. I chose to replace the orange button in the page with buttons in a bottom options menu, so that I can have these 2 buttons(next note & prev note buttons). This made sense because I had multiple possible actions, not just the copy and record options I previously had. This had to be a custom menu, no out of the box menu was good enough. I got to work designing it, design guiding parameters were simple: don't take up too much screen real estate and house all menu options in it. I settled on adding a horizontally scrollable menu at the bottom and adding all the options as icons. I made these icons accessible by showing a description on long-press of each one. All the options including the next and previous note buttons were added to this menu.

Another minor user experience issue was how would the user know if there aren't any more notes while swiping? I decided to fix this through prompts; if the user has accessed the last note available, then he'd see a toast message telling him that there aren't any more notes to retrieve. If he's viewing the most recent note and tries to swipe then he'll be prompted to create a new note.

Future

My users love this feature, this is one of the few features in Ramanie with a 100% approval rating. Building on this success, I'm planning on alerting the user of filters, if any, and allowing them to modify the filters while in the note content page regardless of which page they came from. This will mean that the main notes page's filters will also be applied in the note's content page.

Conclusion

It is evident that I lead in user experience design, ensuring user-centric application development. Building Ramanie as a side project gives me an opportunity to freely experiment and create a one of a kind notes app with a best in class user experience and interface. I don't know about you but I'm yet to come across a notes app with this swipe feature. I continue setting new standards in design and creating great experiences & interfaces for my users.