Pocket Website:
1. Description:
Pocket is a mobile app that allows users to sync online content with their mobile phones and desktop computers for reading offline or at a later time. After logging into your Pocket account users are greeted with a full list of pages which can be filtered by article, image, and video view. Visually, the app is a mix of clean whites and shades of gray, which helps to emphasize the colorful thumbnails tied to many of the entries. Pull to refresh allows you to sync with your latest saved articles, and you can swipe on any entry to reveal options to tag, archive, save, trash, or share with other services. This app is great for someone who likes to surf the internet but doesn't always have time to read lengthy articles at their computer.
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| (Home Screen of Pocket App) |
2. Consistency
Pocket has gone through a number of changes since its introduction, making the app highly consistent and easy to navigate, even when using different devices or accessing through a browser. A quick look at the Mac version of this application shows how hard developers have worked to make the user feel as if they are using a unified service. The other element to Pocket that is important to note is that it attempts to remove all formatting from the original article ultimately giving you a better reading experience. This is a highly important element to the success of Pocket because many people are concerned about the clutter of images and advertisements plaguing their reading experience.
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| (The Mac Version of Pocket Uses a Consistent UI) |
3. Visibility
The goal of Pocket is to make navigating through your saved articles easy while also giving you a comfortable environment to read, tag, save, and share with friends. The article view gives the user many options which allow them the change the size, font, color, and brightness of an article in real time. The bottom navigation bar gives you options to move back to your main list, archive, star, and share. In addition, users can switch to "web view" to see the original formatting of their article if they choose.
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| (Visibility Options on Pocket) |
4. Feedback
The Pocket app gives users many options to produce feedback within an article view by allowing them to favorite, mark as read (causing the article to disappear from main view), or share the article via email, or other online social services. By clicking on the "more" button within the share menu a user can set up one of over 30 social sharing applications and customize their sharing menu to display there most used services. The app also lets users tag articles for easier searching and categorization. Once an item is tagged users can filter by that tag, a feature thats nice if you are saving articles for school or work and want to separate them later.
5. Affordances
While there are many applications that allow you to save articles offline for later viewing such as Evernote, Pocket seems to be primarily about the act of reading and this shows in the way the app is designed and presented to users. The bright color scheme and clean lines of Pocket make it easy to navigate and inviting and helps to encourage the user to stay within the app to perform reading tasks.
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| (Simple and Clean Menu Interface) |
6. Conceptual Model
The conceptual model of Pocket is simplicity and this is achieved by the low number of transition screens and initial settings required by the user. More options and views are available to the user but remain hidden behind a menu only for those users who want to go beyond the bare minimum of the apps functionality. What is great about Pocket is that it remains an app for doing a single task. Even when extra features are accessed they still feel as if they are there to aide you in the activity of reading. One such example is the "Highlights" feature which has categories like best of, quick reads, and long reads. Helping the user parse out the length of content allows them to make better decisions based on the amount of time they have to read (for example, if they are on a bus for 10 minutes). These features feel useful and never get in the way of the overall goal.
(Highlights Menu Option)
The conceptual model of Pocket is simplicity and this is achieved by the low number of transition screens and initial settings required by the user. More options and views are available to the user but remain hidden behind a menu only for those users who want to go beyond the bare minimum of the apps functionality. What is great about Pocket is that it remains an app for doing a single task. Even when extra features are accessed they still feel as if they are there to aide you in the activity of reading. One such example is the "Highlights" feature which has categories like best of, quick reads, and long reads. Helping the user parse out the length of content allows them to make better decisions based on the amount of time they have to read (for example, if they are on a bus for 10 minutes). These features feel useful and never get in the way of the overall goal.
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| (Highlights Menu Option) |
7. Limitations
The limitations of Pocket have mainly to do with restrictions set by operating system makers such as Apple which do not allow for deep integration with these services. To get around this problem Pocket has devised bookmarks which use javascript to forward the article to the service. This workaround is efficient but somewhat clunky and could be improved only if Apple opened up the sharing API. One other limitation is the push of sponsored content atop the article and video views of the app. This is most likely a way for Pocket to produce revenue and is less of a limitation and more of a small annoyance.
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