What was wrong

Let’s take a step back and analyze a few comments about my previous mockup.

The user SRPat wrote one Reddit:

While I do like the design. The app loses Pocket’s brand identity, if someone just saw the app they wouldn’t be able to tell it was Pocket. The toolbar should remain a plain colour (black or white depending on the users theme choice) with Pocket’s signature colours being highlights.

and windowsphoneguy added:

Meh, it’s missing the four signature colors. Those should have been incorporated.

And that is true, my redesign didn’t have that “Pocket-feeling” you currently have when opening the app, the colours weren’t there (I chose to keep only the typical Pocket red, but it wasn’t enough) and not only them, but also the logo was missing.

Another mistake was the one pointed out by Caos2 about the FAB acting as “Mark as Read” on the home page:

This is a huge oversight by the article’s author.

According to the guidelines[1] :

Avoid using floating action buttons for minor and destructive actions, including the following:

- Archive or Trash

My bad, I knew about the “destructive actions” but I was sure Archive wasn’t one of them and it didn’t even crossed my mind. I still think it could be used in that case, since is by far the most common action while reading an article with Pocket, but anyway, let’s follow Google’s guidelines…

Hurra_for_Karamazov stated:

I’ve never designed an app at all, but is it difficult to get the navigation drawer to go all the way up? I see this mistake in pretty much every material redesign.

and he was right, so I’ve fixed that one too.

Other people were having issues with the FAB on the home screen:

I’d rather not have a FAB than a search function… I have NEVER searched through my feeds or saved articles… And even if i would i would only search the saved articles, not my unread articles. Like Google Says: you should only use a FAB for a main feature and if it really adds something. Now it’s only obfuscating the bottom row.

In this case I decided to keep the FAB. I like the idea that, pressing on the “Search” FAB in the home screen you can quickly search articles by label, media content and everything else.

Well, we’ve talked enough about the past, let’s see what’ next.