Wow, Apple just completely revamped the App Store app profiles, it’s quite unexpected but definitely welcome.
It seems like the idea is to make the App Store more graphical. The app icons are bigger and the screenshots are more prominent. If you have a Multi-Touch trackpad/mouse you can now also swipe through them a little bit like on the iPhone.
Furthermore you’ll notice that the full app description text is now mostly hidden from the view and there is an emphasis on the what’s new in the latest version of the app.
Lastly, the number of customer reviews displayed on the app’s profile page has increased, apparently Apple still believes in its review system…
It’s spreading through the App Store as we speak. You might still hit a couple old profiles but probably not for long.
How do you like it ?
I don’t like having to scroll to the side to see all the photos. The scrollbar is far to small! Bring back the buttons. But the rest of the changes look alright…I guess.
I just popped into the App Store before reading this article and it was a shocker, to say the least. I was very impressed with the larger Icon graphic and the more prominant views of the screen shots (especially since I was looking at an app for photo retouching). I like that the other apps by the same company are linked more prominantly under the new large icon and the larger icon list at the bottom of the page showing what other apps people bought. With the advent of some of the apps’ updates being broken (there’s been a few as of late that the updates break the app – Shazam was a big one for that), I like that I can see at the top of the screen what is new for the current version, as I now check the update info. before downloading any app update. I don’t usually rely on the star rating of the app, but I do read the reviews and comments for each new version before update and I like how they revamped that area to find the reviews for the current version more easily then before. Overall, I think it’s a much better and more inviting look for the App Store. On the other side of the coin, I hate the new interface of the music/video area of iTunes; wish they had kept the old look and feel for that until they got something more workable. And I wish that you could add Apps to your Wish List (what used to be the shopping cart). I hate finding 3 or 4 apps that I want and having to purchase them individually.
I poked around a bit more and found out that the option to add the app to your Wish List is there now. That’s the best feature of the new design for me! Glad Apple did this; makes my use of the iTunes store even more likely and I’ll probably land up spending more because of the addition of Apps to the Wish List. Thank you Apple!
Also, they’ve finally allowed apps to be added to a wish list.
IT’S HORRIBLE!!
i have an app that is now under review. as a soon-to-be seller on the app store, i think the changes they have made fly in the face of usability. its like some community college wannabe photoshop 101 student made the app store! seriously, there are so many usability flaws everywhere.
too much hidden functionality (as already pointed out here – sharing and wishlist functions are hidden next to the buy button – why? also, there are like 5 lines there – this space savings is insignificant compared to the troubles of hiding the functions for the user!).
due to the truncating of the description – have have seen MANY USELESS descriptions. things like “NEW FEATURES” and then… NOTHING! and that more button is tiny. so dumb. if you want to put emphasis on the screenshots, then just put them on top!
and the fact that there is mostly now long lines of tiny type stretching from one edge of the screen to the other – who wants to read that? what happened to… columns??
this may give the impression of clean and nice, however the previous app store layout was MUCH MUCH more usable. very very disappointing.
I actually like that they didn’t take away space and made the purchasing options and like fuctions grouped as they are in the music section of the store…having continuality across the iTunes interface is much better than having the old 2 different layouts. I and others that had to get used to the new layout when purchasing music are now used to this new layout for the Wish List, Gifting, etc. options.
I do feel that the store could have given more space to the description of the app; however, having the update information NOT truncated and located at the top (NOT buried in the text towards the bottom of the description column) is MUCH better. I’ve decided to update and purchase more apps because this information is much easily available to me and I didn’t have to take extra time to scan through a bunch of text to find it (if I bought the app and it needs an update, I don’t need to see all the description text of what the app does or its features, obviously). As for the screen shots, they are towards the top of the screen. I have a fairly small screen on my netbook and I get 3/4 of the images in my window.
Long lines of type? I see text across a page like any other typed page that isn’t done in the style of a periodical/newspaper form. Personally, I hated seeing all that text smashed into a small column on the right side – where, as stated in the article review, my eye does not wander to automatically when I first open the page. And scrolling down is a pain in the @ss for someone that doesn’t have a mouse and using a track pad that isn’t very well versed with it. I do agree with one of the other commenters that they should make the horizontal bar to scroll the screen shots a bit wider; it is a bit hard to operate at it’s current height.
It’s quite clear that you don’t like the changes, but to bash the designers and accuse them of being bumbling design students is plain rude (and especially demeaning to those that attend a community college – many of the greatest people in history attended a community college). You could have made your points easily without the bashing. All that ranting before your valid points were made just caused me to think that I hope that I don’t know what app you’re working on/trying to sell because if I did I know that it had better have a superior UI, innovative and exciting features, and a great looking icon and not come out looking like a 2nd grader did the work. Do you have enough confidence in YOUR design that you’d care to tell the name of your forthcoming app?
As a person who has a really wide screen, it’s really annoying not having a smaller column.
If you’d like a smaller column for the text, just resize the iTunes window. The text is formatted to fit in the confines of the window without scrolling horizontally. I found that works good for apps that don’t have a lengthy descrption.
*description
I believe this tell us a lot about how not important the descriptions are for iPhone users but more important are the screenshot, customers reviews and ratings. It is def a shock but I have a feeling people will like this more graphical style than the previous one.