How do you run online services (a.k.a. web apps)?

Kacper Raubo
3 replies
As for native ones, we use icons located on our home screens or desktops. But what when it comes to online services? You manually type in a URL addresses, use bookmarks? I came up with this question building a general space with online services, wondering how to make it easier for people to use the more and more popular web-based software. That would be great to learn more about your practices!

Replies

Kevin T.
I just bookmark for the ones I frequently use...someone just wrote that, didn't they?
Richard Gao
Bookmark for ones I frequently use. Url for ones I use less. Overall, I don't think there is much you can do for people to use very popular web apps, since those already have good UI. However, there are tens of thousands of poorly designed UI web apps that are relatively popular, and probably double an amount that has good UI, but has other things that make them annoying to use (toxic community, annoying ads, etc). So I think a good solution for this would be to design a way for users to customize the way they interact with a web app by placing an overlay. For example, maybe getting to the privacy settings of facebook is too much of a hassle, and for some reason, there's a user that likes to toggle it frequently. In this case, you could have an overlay that allows them create their own UI for facebook where there's buttons for easily getting to the privacy settings. Furthermore, there's probably also a bunch of settings that people don't use that often that sit there taking up space and making it hard to find other ones. Since you'll have the option of including whatever your want in your custom UI, you can deal with those easily too. There's plenty of web apps where I would love to have this product, and even more mobile apps (though overlays are MUCH harder to design for those, especially if they're third party).
Kacper Raubo
Interesting view, @richard_gao2. I am not sure if it should have the form you proposed, but I agree that it would be great to make it easier for users to interact with settings across various apps. Thanks for sharing your idea!