Flipboard Redesign

Search & Filterin Flipboard Platform

Duration

2023.11

Responsibilities

Heuristic Evaluation, User Interviews, UI Design, Prototype

Team

Individual project

Context

About Flipboard APP

An RSS platform for users to read articles and news from various publication sources on the platform conveniently.

  • Like, collect, and share articles
  • Organize articles for same topics into their own magazines

Discover

Why Redesign Search Bar and Filter?

Flipboard is an integrated information platform, so publication sources that publishing news and articles on the platform are very complicated and diverse.

Potential Problems

Empathize & Define

Evaluate and Identify Main Issues needed to be Optimized

Problem 1

Pain Point

There’s no function for users to search specific articles and topics precisely and quickly.

Search whole title of the article, search results only show:

  • Publication sources
  • Topics
  • Magazines
  • Profiles

User Need

Users need search bars and filters to search specific article for saving times or in a hurry.

Problem 2

Pain Point

After collecting lots of articles from different publication sources into users’ magazines, it’s hard to retrieve the article quickly.

The magazine I created, named “UX Design”, has articles from different publication sources such as smashing magazine, medium, ux planet, etc.

User Need

User need search bars and filters to narrow down the results and retrieve information from what they collected.

Problem 3

Pain Point

It’s hard for users to search the article because they can’t tell what topics included just by the title.

Seeing the article, it’s unintuitive to think about that it is under the topic of #MINIMALISM, which make it harder to search.

User Need

Users need to know what topic tags are related to the article,  so it can be easier to search.

Ideate & Prototype

Redesign the Search Bar and Filters

Search “Topic” at Search Page

Filter: Directly search for several information of the specific article

Search functions in Filter include:

  • Title
  • Publication Source
  • Author
  • Publish Date
  • Other Topic Tags

Search “Article Title”: Directly show the specific article

Article information include: Title, Abstract, Publication Source, Topic Tags (#...), Share, Collect, Like

Search “Article” at Magazine Page

  • Add search bar and filter for retrieving specific article more quickly.
  • Rearrange the layout of the Magazine page and Article information.

Add “Topic Tags” for the article below

Annotate all related topics under the article information, so users can have clear reference to search the article faster.

Filter: Narrow down search results to retrieve certain articles in magazine

Search and Multi-selected functions in Filter include:

  • Title
  • Publication Source
  • Topics
  • Publish Date

After setting up the filter, it would only show corresponding articles

  • Publications: UX Planet
  • Topics: #User Interaction, #UXMagazine

New Feature: Highlights and Notes

Note down certain paragraphs in the article and categorize them in topics

Sometimes users just want to save an important paragraph, rather than save a whole article.