Back in May we got a peek at what the Canonical Design Team has in store for the future of Ubuntu on the desktop and across devices going forward.
At the heart of it is a new tabbed Dash browser design that unifies and streamlines the navigational inconsistencies and limitations of the current Scopes design.
But Scopes are nothing without cards. Cards are the search results and data snippets that are surfaced with a Scope, be it a Wikipedia article on a band, a matching application from the Ubuntu Store, or some NearBy Scope suggestions on places to eat.
The origami and paper influences of the Suru design language are to extend much further in Canonical’s proposed designs, with greater use of layering, lighting and an improved colour palette.
The new Cards also sport ‘instant actions’. These are small, interactive icons that let you, for example, like a photo from Facebook or upvote an article on Reddit all directly from the card result snippet itself.
Canonical designer Alex Milazzo has posted a small tease of redesigned Scopes Toolkit Cards on the Ubuntu Designers Dribbble page. Illustrating the illustrations (heh) is the following snippet:
“Our objectives for this project are to design new scope cards that behave in a consistent, predictable fashion; showing a useful or timely piece of information and present information to users with a consistent look and feel across different devices, screen sizes and modes.”
The current Scope Cards spec already allows a lot of the information you see in the image above to be displayed — but it looks far less creative. Not squashing every image preview into the recessed ‘squircle’ design is a big boon alone!
Contrast the Spotify app result card in the mockup at the top of this post with the current app search result card:
