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Replacing the radio in the car with spoken word content alone is hard. I'm really glad that Umano is trying!
Really like the narration of articles with a real human voice...the robotic voice in other apps is sleep inducing.
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@anamitra Agreed! Have been distancing myself from Newsbeat for this reason. But I think Umano can handle notifications better. Treat that space like a frugal twitter - yes, I really said that! ;)
Nice set of updates in the 6.0 release, importantly with a shift towards interviews, talks, and podcasts.
- Umano is proud to serve you more types of content beyond just news articles. You can now listen to interviews, talks, awesome gems from podcasts, and more!
- Search: Quicker access to search from the Explore Tab
- Notifications: Quick access to all of your most important notifications from the Activity Tab
- Visual Refresh: A revamp of the user experience to put the content first
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@chrismessina I can not agree with the statement that it "puts the content first".
The worst is that even on the iPhone 6+, with plenty of screen real estate, only two articles are shown in the list style views, which are used in ubiquity throughout the app.
In previous versions one screen displayed roughly eight items, hence now you can discover only 25% of the content at a single glance.
Especially if one considers that the app still relies heavily on exploration done by the user–there even is a tab called "explore"–this is a clear regression.
The underlying design principle must have been:
"If there is one thing that people love to do on mobile devices it is scrolling. So let's hide the content by making lists four times as long."
Of course the images are flashier, but at the same time the inverted text (white on darkgray with a slightly transparency), which should provide crucial information (source, title, length), is less legible than before.
The lack of designated white space and the inconsistency of image quality regarding contrast, brightness, color-saturation and noisiness of the subject depicted, doesn't help either.
Both aspects combined make it harder to use and actually more difficult to discover content.
@chrismessina@boettges Thanks for the feedback. We typically see that people consume content on Umano in two ways: 1) by browsing around and playlist-ing articles 2) by simply playing the first article in the recommendations and then swiping right in the full-screen mode.
Our goal with the new feed design was to discourage scrolling and encourage the "lean-back experience", which typically shows better engagement results.
I think your comments on not being able to parse the content as easily are vaild, and we hope to address them in the upcoming follow up update.
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