Wither the Dashboard Pattern

Recently I barely managed to register for this year's Google IO conference. One of my favorite sessions from last year's conference was on UI patterns in Android.

It's a great video, you should definitely watch it. The first pattern that they talk about is the Dashboard. You can see their example of a dashboard in the video, but there was an even more concrete example: Twitter for Android. The Twitter app was released just before IO, and it was developed jointly by Google and Twitter. It showcased the UI patterns that Google wanted designers and developers to start using to help create some expectations for users. Here's the Twitter dashboard:

The idea is simple. The home screen of your app provides shortcuts to all of the major components of the app. The combination of using this pattern in a popular app (Twitter has 5M+ downloads) and evangelizing it at the IO conference certainly had the desired results. Many other apps adopted the pattern, including every platform's most popular app, Facebook:

The pattern has been a hit with note-taking/organizer apps like Evernote:

Evernote's more recent competitor Springpad also uses a dashboard:

Evernote and Springpad are both popular apps, with more than 1.5M downloads between them. Another very popular app that uses the dashboard is Yelp:

Google's Yelp/Foursquare compettitor Places also uses the dashboard pattern:

Finally, there's my favorite Android music player MixZing:

MixZing shows that you can be a little creative with the dashboard pattern. So the pattern's been a big success, right? Users are familiar with it and developers have embraced it. So it was a little surprising to me to see that Twitter has now decided that the dashboard is not so good after all:

There's no more dashboard in the 2.0 version of Twitter's app. The release notes allude to the major problem with the dashboard pattern: it forces the user to constantly go to the dashboard if they want to navigate to a different part of the app. It makes everything at least two taps away. Of course it makes it easy for the user to find things, since they can just go to the dashboard to find a shortcut to whatever they are looking for. For example, how do you think you find what's trending on the Twitter app now (go to search) or view your profile (gotta use the dreaded Android menu)? Maybe Twitter has found that their users rarely use these features, so the new design will be more effective for the vast majority of their users.

Speaking of the new design, it obviously uses a tab layout. This is a more common UI pattern in Android and has its own set of APIs to make it easy to use for developers. There are a lot of examples of tab layouts out there, such as Foursquare:

Another example is one of my favorite apps, Bump:

I won't bore you with more examples, as there are a lot. I think it's often very comfortable for a web app going native to use a tab design. It often mimics their website. That's why I picked Foursquare and Bump, two apps that are what I would consider mobile-first. Most people's first interaction with either company is through their mobile apps, not through their desktop web browser.

The other common pattern worth mentioning briefly is what I call Listomania. You start off with lists, and keep going from there like traversing a tree. Here's Google Reader:

And here's Kayak's listomania:

Personally I don't find the Listomania format very user friendly. I think it is often a by-product of porting an iPhone app that makes heavy use of UINavigationControllers (in all fairness, many of the tab-using Android apps are the products of porting iPhone apps that used a UITabBarController). I think the dashboard usually solves the same kind of problem (lots of features, hierarchy) in a nicer way. The tab alternative is more of the Pareto principle, putting all of the focus on the most commonly used features. Anyways, it will be interesting to see if the dashboard pattern becomes less common now that it's poster-child has ditched it.

To Suggest or Not To Suggest

Ajax has been one of the most hyped technologies in recent memory. However, much of the hype is deserved. It really has changed the way we (web developers) build applications and the expectation of users. One of the archetypes of Ajax is the auto-suggest text box. I don't know who first came up with, but I first remember seeing it on Google. I think it was once a "special" version of the Google home page (Google Suggest?), but not it is standard:

It makes for a natural option on search text boxes. Here it is on some of the other search engines out there. Yahoo:

And on the search hotness, Bing:

Of course pure search engines are hardly the only sites that have search and thus have auto-suggest text boxes. It's pretty useful for ecommerce sites too...

As you can see, some sites have gotten creative with their suggestions. Here is another great example of that from Apple:

All of these examples are for search text boxes. If what you want is not suggested, you can still type it and the application will perform a search on it. A little more interesting example is on Facebook:

Here there is a "closed list" behind the suggest box: your friends. However, it is still a search box. If you type something that is not in the list, it will still perform a search that will return results. Of course, really all of the suggest boxes have a closed list behind them as well, but that list is probably much bigger than your list of friends on Facebook (unless you are Robert Scoble.) So the theme continues: there is a finite set of predetermined suggestions, but if you type in something not in that set, the application can still process your input.
Recently, I saw a different use for auto-suggest boxes: as a drop-in replacement for select/option boxes (a.k.a. drop-down box or combo box). This is fundamentally different than any of the examples above. It would be like the Facebook example, but with the limitation that your friends were the only valid input into the search box. In fact, Facebook has a scenario that is similar to this: tagging people in photos/videos:

However, even in this case, you can type the name of somebody who is not one of your friends. This is valid input. After all, maybe not everybody that you take pictures of has an account on Facebook. My kids are growing up fast, but my five year old son is not yet on Facebook...
I imagine that this pattern -- using auto-suggest box to replace a select/option box -- is used on websites out there. It seems like a reasonable thing to do to avoid a drop-down with a large number of choices, or a drop-down that is expensive to calculate and is often not used. However, it seems awkward, too. What do you do when a user types in something that is not in the box? I like to type, and I'm both reasonably fast at it and make enough spelling mistakes that this could be a common scenario from me.
Now I am no user experience expert. In fact, as a web developer, I would say that I am perhaps the least qualified person when it comes to judging user experience on the web. My knowledge makes me very forgiving of things that might be confusing to others, while it also makes me critical of things that others would not notice. So I am curious about other's people's experiences and opinions. Are there sites out there that use this pattern? Is it useful or awkward?