Plasma 5.19: Some sketches for improving Discover navigation (feedback)

This month I’m moving place and country actually, and obviously you don’t care, but I’m warning you! Some weird things gonna happen on this channel..hopefully! Back to KDE, and few weeks ago I had done some quick sketches for Discover, so I want to show you those, take some feedback, and then I will try to submit more complete mockups on KDE discussions! The problem I’m trying to solve is on application navigation, and it has two steps! The first is this mess with the categories and subcategories on sidebar, and the super bad way for returning! The second is when we get inside an application page, then we get this double column navigation! That is so confusing for users but also so expensive for developers, because they have to maintain two layouts, and there’re so many usability issues on doing so! On my previous video I showed you Calindori application that’s featuring a horizontal navigation! However KDE design only supports vertical navigation, or at least there aren’t guidelines for creating horizontal routing, and so on my mockups I followed closely the current design of Discover, without any major changes! Plus I wanted to create something doable rather doing fantasy! I didn’t create detailed mockups but it should be enough to get the main idea, plus I took into account that it should work on touch and small screens! So, without further waiting, here we are! First is the sidebar that has a number of fixed items that never change, and the two major categories are games and apps! On phone mode becomes a typical drawer, like rest KDE apps, so I didn’t design that! Then we have the search and the back button, that always go to the previous visited screen! I’d prefer both back and forward buttons, but nobody does that so I skipped! I don’t really fancy the place of the search, but I didn’t want to do horizontal navigation! On Home page we have the typical “Featured” “New and Updated” etc, and I skipped in purpose to create application banners, because judging from GNOME Software they fail big time! I mean they are hardcoded and almost 9 of 10 times are bad recommendations anyway! One last thing is that under the rating I also added the number of downloads! This is something I really wanna see before getting an app! When we are getting inside a category, for example Games, then we have an option to open a filter! This works with tags and also can work together with search, so we can create some more complex queries That’s also useful because many applications are not clear on what category belong, so we can just select multiple! Sorting had to be a dedicated dropdown, but I leave it here as a concept! And finally, when we get inside a details page we have double columns no more! It is a single page and so navigation works as it should, and instead we get a list with similar apps! That’s by the way something I desperately want to see in GNOME Software too! And now it is time for KDE developers to get back in work and make baby WOGUE happy :)) .