Apps Looking for user interface advice

[rollie]

I have looked around for a forum for UI development advice/criticism, but haven't had much luck (if anyone know of such a forum, please let me know!). Anyway, I was hoping to get a little feedback on a UI for a sports app:

Photo Album - Imgur

Obviously content isn't quite there, but that's the layout I'm thinking of. The tab control is a multi-sliding drawer I built. The header items would all be clickable, so if you wanted to look at a different player, you would select 'C.Perez', a dialog would be displayed with all the Indians players, and you could select another player. Alternately, if you wanted to look at the Yankees, you could click on 'indians', and a list of all the other teams in the AL would be displayed. I don't know where I'm going to put a 'settings' dialog - it may appear when you slide 'News' down, but I don't know how to signify to the user visually that that is how you get to the settings.

So...how do I make it sexier?

 

[GeorgeN]

Hi, I quite like the sliding drawer control. But I'm not sure about the rounded edges on the handles - the tiny white triangles at the corners look a little strange. And you can put your settings dialog on the phones menu button.

Also:

Avoid the big block of empty white space in the first screenshot. Maybe pin the first tab to the top of the screen so it is always open?

Use complimentary colors (Red and Blue are not complimentary).

Put a small margin around your text-views, it looks a little weird if the text is squashed right up to the edge of the screen.

I'm not sure about making the header's click-able like you describe. I think you will end up accidentally clicking when you want to drag. Why not add a search-bar within the players view? Have it collapse when with the rest of the player content.

 

[rollie]

Re the empty white space, that would be the settings section, if I decide to go that route. If not though, I will definitely pin the first tab to the top, which would prevent users accidentally clicking a tab when they meant to change from 'Indians' to 'Yankees'.

Thanks for the other notes though! I will do that, and change the 'News' text to be considerably more professional looking (honestly, I hadn't gotten around to styling that at all yet). Search bar with non-clickable header would be confusing for sections like 'News' - are we searching for news about the Blue Jays? Or do we want to change our 'layout' to a bluejays layout, with the appropriate tabs, etc? I'll dummy up some more and see how it looks with your other suggestions though.