Adium Reborn - UI proposal

[Sherif S.]

On 2013-05-02, at 3:07 PM, Oskar Krawczyk <oskar.krawczyk at gmail.com> wrote
> 
> Just a quick introduction, my name's Oskar, I'm a UI/UX designer/developer.

Hello Oskar,

I'm not a dev, but I'm a passionate user (and briefly tester) of Adium, so I'll throw in my two cents.

> In February, I tweeted about how the messenger market for mac is lacking, mentioning Adium in the process. Robert Vehse replied saying that if I have a suggestion I should create something, so I teamed up with a great UI designer and friend of mine (Dawid), and started working on a completely rethought frontend for Adium.
> 
> The initial blog post about the Adium Case Study http://nouincolor.com/blog/adium-reborn/ (click on the screen for a full presentation - click to change the slide).

First of all, really nicely-designed website. Kudos.

Functional things that I really like:

1- Pinned messages: yes! so awesome. That would make scrolling up to see a reference message so much easier (well, unnecessary) (however see ** below)

2- Better menu-bar list: Active Study a la Fantastical would be really cool. I love using Fantastical's natural language parsing, and it could benefit Adium a lot, as long as it's not done while replacing the actions in menus or contextual menus.

3- Dropbox attachment zone: do I even need to say anything? That's just sexy.

> I've been using Adium for years (remember this or this), as much as I like it, I'd love if this project could take a bolder move, and adopt a minimalistic UI as we've created - this could potentially open the doors to a completely new user-base.

** This is the part that I don't like so much. There has been a trend in Mac software design for less information density and much more spacing out, and I don't know how many other people feel the same way, but I strongly, strongly dislike it. I bought a refurbed 17" MBP because I want the real estate and want to have tons of information available without having to scroll or move things, and since Apple's taken that away, I already have to imagine going down to a 15" in a number of years. I don't want to also have less information per square-inch.

Some of the things I love about current Adium

- I can have 10s of contacts and channels in my contact list and see them all without having to click on a menu or scroll a lot. If I understand the design correctly, the user will have to click on the menu to see their contacts, and then there's going to be a lot of scrolling.

- I can have many tabs on the bottom of the conversation window and see them all without having to scroll, until there is truly too many of them. This design is a lot like Messages, with way less contacts in the same area than current Adium.

- I can see tons of text in the conversation window without having to scroll (and I picked a Message Style and font that makes that happen). I don't know if Message Styles are considered for this design, but it seems to aim for/prefer a much more spaced-out message view. More like iMessage/texting than heavy IM-ing.

As for the user base, this has been discussed a couple of times on the #adium-devl IRC channel. I don't know that this will bring over a whole new demographic. I don't think Adium's user base is not bigger because people don't see a minimalist/modern-y design, it's because not that many people IM, and they text/iMessage/WhatsApp more. My guess — which could very well be wrong — is that people who want Adium for IM like having the customizability and high information density provided by current Adium. Those who don't just use GTalk in the browser.

I hope I didn't ramble too much. I know that is not the final design, and they're just screenshots, but those are my current thoughts on what I could see. Whatever happens, there is some functionality there that would be awesome for current Adium to get.

Cheers,

— Sherif