Fixing the Pushbullet iOS app
Pushbullet is my go-to app for sharing links (most of my reading) between my devices (Mostly Chrome to iPhone). Over the past few months it’s helped me get to a lot of reading by just queuing up in my browser. I like to clear my tabs, so I have to read before I do that. It’s been a lot stressful using the iOS app though.
Sharing between apps is easy on android ecosystem, which makes the Pushbullet app for the platform perfect. To do a quick share, select Pushbullet from the “Share to” options, select device to share to, and send the push. But on iOS sharing doesn’t work that way. And so there’s a lot of steps involved in sharing a simple link to my computer.
So I decided to redesign the experience and hope they try to do this in a future release. (Also used this to play around with Pixate)
The Push Feed
First thing I designed was the push feed, as the current one gives no context about the links being send. A little link parsing should be possible, yeah?
Create New Screen
My suggestions to make this screen better are
- Some Memory please! Last device sent to, last type of push. Please remember something dear Pushbullet app.
- Automatic pasting from clipboard. All the time I’ve used the app, I’ve copied content from other apps first. The app can paste clipboard content immediately the new screen comes up and highlight the text on selection.
- Hide the title by default. I hardly ever use a title Declutter the screen and allow simple swipe to reveal title. I made a Pixate Prototype to demo it below
Finally, Quick Push
My final idea was; if the app can remember the last device I pushed to, the type of push, and can pull content from the clipboard, why can’t I long press to send a push? The interaction will be something like this
I really hope the Pushbullet engineers make it easier to use their iOS app.
