The Choices Circa Made

The Circa app (As of January 2014) is notable for the choices the designers made. And the choices they made.

• The color palette is consistent.
• The leading is consistent and generous.
• Upcoming information is faded and effectively previews content.
• The  app can be used with gestures from one thumb, making it great for one thumb use.
• Just the right number of stories are presented on each day.

They made quite a few good choices.

• They chose to hide most social sharing under a button, instead of surfacing all the options directly within the app.
• They chose to invest in making good recommendations about related content.
• They chose to invest in designing an elegant right rail breadcrumb that both respects the centrality of the content, and indicates how far along somebody is.
• They chose to invest in chunking each piece of content into a thematic, coherent, summarized format.

Everything about Circa is about saving time and staying informed. It delivers on it’s brand promise.

Contrast that with all the things they could have done:

• They could have surfaced social sharing figures; how many times it was tweeted, liked, shared, reddited, digged, etc.
• They could have excluded related content links.
• They could have not included any crumbs at all.
• They could have delivered a straight up column of text.

They could have looked just like anybody else.

They chose focus instead.

That’s notable.