Betworks Gives Instapaper New Interface After Purchase

By: Ali Raza  |   August 28th, 2013   |   News

The creator of Instapaper Marco Arment gave up its read-it-later service to Betaworks back in April and since then the new owner of the site is looking to bring new changes to the platform. So finally on Wednesday, August 28th Betawroks was able to upgrade the interface of Instapaper, which according to many required the overhaul more than anything. Shedding light on the re-design of Instapaper, Betaworks revealed that its team initially upgraded the performance of the service, enhanced its reliability and then updated its design. As a result of this update in the design, Instapaper now offers a navigation bar on its left side with a simple layout that is quite similar to mobile apps.

 

Betaworks launched the new design of the website in beta at the start of this month and now all users can access it. Apart from the new interface, the addition of UI is also quite commendable, but still Instapaper largely based on text, as Betaworks has also kept the usage of videos support and images to a minimal extent in contrast to its rival service Pocket. Below are few excerpts from the original blog post of Instapaper engineer, who had designed the new interface:

 

“When I got the opportunity to redesign the Instapaper website my goal was to do justice to the service Instapaper provides. In the FAQ quoted above, Marco referred to the “information-skimming, speed-overload mode” we often enter while surfing. I think of Instapaper as a place I can go to take a break from that mode, and I wanted the design of the website to signal and support that break.

 

To do that I focused on simplicity. Your Instapaper tab should be a refuge from the infinite-scrolling, content-suggesting feeds vying for your attention across the web. A place where the content you know you want to see is supported by design that gets out of the way.

 

Of course that’s easy to say, and it’s even relatively easy to achieve that state of relaxing simplicity at the beginning of a refresh. The real fight is in maintaining it as you add features back in. I was determined both to guard that simplicity and to build a base that could support additional features without collapsing into incoherence. You can see some of how that struggle played out in my previous post on folders, the feature where I had the greatest difficulty balancing feature utility and overall simplicity.”

 

Source: TheVerge, InstapaperBlog