Feb 3, 2012
4 notes
[Flash 10 is required to watch video]

Peeking

I’d like to talk about a little iOS UI design pattern that I like a lot. I’m not sure if it’s common enough to have a name yet, so I’m going to call it “peeking” for now.

1. An Example

The video above is of a list view. You can see that when you pull down (scrolling the list up past the first item), there’s a little bit of information. When you let go, the list view rubber-bands back and that information goes away. In this case, the list is of search results, and the bit of information is the term that the user searched for. By pulling down a bit on the list, you can peek at a bit of related information. It doesn’t make conceptual sense to put the search query in the list itself (since the list is of search results, and the search query isn’t a search result), and it won’t necessarily fit in the view’s title bar (besides, the title bar should be for describing what the view is/does).

2. Generally

I think you’d use a peeking view when you have some information that the user might need to be reminded of but would otherwise live another view (requiring the user to leave the current view). By including the information above the top of the list, the information’s out of the way if the user doesn’t need it, but only a pull-down gesture away when they do. Alternatively, you could use a peeking view when you wanted to provide users with a hint about what they should do. Users who already know what to do wouldn’t see anything unusual, but users who don’t know what to do could just pull down to see the hint and let go once they’ve seen it.

3. Other Examples

I don’t know of many other examples of peeking. If you try to reply to a tweet in Tweetbot, you can pull the compose area down and you’ll see the tweet that you’re replying to. I guess, technically, you can also see it in apps (Twitter or otherwise) that use pull-to-refresh — that little “pull to refresh” view also shows the last time that the app refreshed its data. If you know of any other apps that use peeking, or if there are other posts about it by other people, I’d love to hear about them. Answers enabled?

  1. smasuch answered: When you’re writing a reply to a tweet in Tweetbot, peeking shows the tweet you’re replying to.
  2. scottjacksonx posted this
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