Dashboard information architecture

[whitep4nth3r]

Keep it simple

The fact that there are two separate navigation/menu areas is confusing. All navigation should be housed in one place. I think what you were going for was more of a 'tabbed' approach with separate areas for Home, Apps and Topics, but at this point I think it's more efficient for all information to be presented in a central dashboard, or hub.

I mocked something up really quickly in the browser:

Information architecture

There is, however, the concern of information architecture and hierarchy. As a result of the current kind-of-tabbed-view, it felt that "Welcome", "Apps" and "Topics" were all "top-level" pieces of information.

Ignoring "Welcome" for a second (which isn't really suited to its own screen unless we're going to provide some useful actions), at this point it looked like Apps and Topics were both separate and equal entities. However, after using the app I have concluded that a Topic must belong to an App, and Subscriptions must belong to Topics. Therefore, we probably want to infer this entity architecture in the structure of the app.

I propose at this point that:

1. the "Home" screen (which, for all intents and purposes could just be the "Apps" screen) shows a list of "Apps"
2. a single "App" screen shows a list of "Topics"
3. a single "Topic" screen shows a list of "Subscriptions"

Whilst this is almost achieved for the most part, I think it would be helpful to list the children items of each parent entity in a cohesive way.

For example, currently the way the "Topics" are presented pictorially is that they are the parent of an app, when it should be the other way around.

Current view: