Walk by anyone’s desk at my office and you’ll see TweetDeck running or minimized in the background. It started as a great piece of software for the hardcore Twitterer and has matured into a pretty good social feed aggregator. I never really loved the UI though. It’s treatment of the chicklet buttons across the top always seemed to be an inelegant way to execute a button bar.

The other day I decided to incorporate social media feed monitoring into my daily routine (acquiescing is a more appropriate word) so naturally I popped open TweetDeck, but I started to feel the same “ho-hum” response I had when I first noticed the app. Yes they have a few new features, but the UI and experience of using the app has remained largely the same. It was then when I remembered Skimmer, the application built and distributed by Fallon and designed by Andy Gugel. I remember giving it a brief mention on this blog and promising to kick the tires a bit – which I’m now getting to.

Aside from the beautiful visual design of the application – with it’s strong use of a gridded structure and subtle tone-on-tone coloring – I really like how you can commingle the feed to incorporate all of your social accounts into one reverse-chron feed. You can also minimize the application into simply the feed as a widget (smaller footprint on your desktop). This feature is great. I know TweetDeck does that too, but I don’t like the way that TweetDeck’s minimized view is the same main application view – just resized to be smaller. It’s inelegant. Skimmer on the other hand actually repositions and re-imagines the UI for the smaller footprint.

So the bottom line is that I’m a Skimmer fan – great work Fallon and Andy. I prefer an application that (arguably) does less, is positioned as a great user experience rather than a hardcore workhorse, looks great and simplifies the process of interacting with its main objective over anything else.

We’re starting to see glimpses of this new breed to “application design” in Fallon‘s new social media aggregator called Skimmer (designed by Andy Gugel):

Lots of usability experts will surely take issue with some of the affordances and contrast decisions made in this application, as well as pick apart some of the ID. And they’ll have points to be considered surely, but at the end of the day – it’s gorgeous. And my point of view isn’t just as a visual designer geeking out on a beautiful design. Skimmer represents the possibility of moving away form the expected and into the immersive.

We’re moving toward that future-state we’ve all known was just around the corner, a state where highly meaningful and functional interactions are facilitated through immersive interfaces. And business needs are solved through interactive design.

Great work Andy and the entire Fallon team.