Designing a Reddit App

October 12, 2010

I love reddit. It’s an amazing platform for sharing cat photos and waging pseudo intellectual wars. I love the serious business and the herp-derping. I love the AMA’s and TIL’s. Reddit is like a magical website where everything is awesome.

Sadly, Reddit’s official iPhone app lacks the features and polish I would expect from such a magical website.

That’s why I’ve started designing a new reddit app.

The Plan

Step 1: Design the App

Let’s start by defining some common tasks people perform on reddit so that we can build an experience around that.

  • Reading Subreddits (similar to topics or categories)
  • Upvoting/Downvoting links and comments
  • Leaving a comment on a link
  • Replying to comments

Then draft some wireframes that outline the overall interaction flow — making sure the core tasks are accessible and intuitive to perform.

Application wireframes for a Reddit iPhone app

First draft of application interaction flow

Along the way I’ve added some nice to have features such as search, user profiles, subreddit logos, triforcing, and other user interface niceties. While these are interesting features, I’ll have to confirm these are technically feasible and available via reddit’s poorly documented API.

I’m also spec’ing out support for gesture shortcuts i.e. “swipe to upvote/downvote”, “double-tap to save on reddit/copy link” and designing some UI for more advanced features like managing multiple reddit (novelty) accounts. These ideas will be fleshed out more in follow-up posts.

Step 2: Develop the App

While my area of expertise lies mostly in design, I do have programming experience. Realistically, this project will take somewhere between 3–6 months to complete. This includes designing the visual assets, researching the reddit API (or reverse engineering it), and writing all the fancy codes.

Reddit is no longer developing their official app, iReddit, and have released the source code. While this is a great start, I feel it would be better to start from scratch so I can architect a more solid foundation to build upon.

What’s Next?

Gather feedback from the reddit community, revise, develop, and iterate! Development will start on the iPhone platform and expand to Android, and possibly Blackberry.

Stay tuned for a follow-up post where I’ll show you some of the visual designs I’m exploring.

What You Can Do to Help

View this post on reddit. My username on reddit is veroz. ʘ‿ʘ