A new shiny roof for our daily showcases!
Hi everyone,
To those who’ve been with us since the beginnings, when MaterialUp was just a listing site for Material Design, to those who joined along the way and got all excited with us when Googlers chatted with us on Slack (!), and those who recently started paying visits to those shiny showcases: thank you, a million times. It would simply not exist without you 😊
We’ve worked relentlessly over the past year to make the site better, more intuitive, and give more value to every visit you paid us! And with every change, we thought it through, diligently. This week we’re rolling out the biggest changes yet, and we’d like to share with you the vision behind it.
We’re putting MaterialUp, SiteUp and iOSUp under one domain name: UpLabs.com
Bear with us, it apparently takes about 4 minutes to get used to! That’s what a long-time MaterialUp friend said anyways ;)
So, where are MaterialUp, SiteUp and iOSUp going?
In essence, they’re not going anywhere. The experience will stay the same, it’s just another url. Don’t worry about that last part either, it’s all been neatly engineered, so nothing will be lost. You’ll also see that the top menu bar makes the site a lot easier to use; from there you can browse inspiration, UI tools, and go straight to one of the daily showcases.
Honestly your routine won’t change much. In fact, you’ll find your way around the site a lot better than before. Which brings us to our second point.
Why the change?
(many reasons! but in a nutshell…)
Overall to have a better structure of the site. It’s become incredibly difficult to manage three sites in the backend. Another thing is, it will make it clearer for new visitors to understand what we’re about and what value the site provides — which means a stronger community. But most importantly, and that was the tipping point: to fix browsability issues we had on the site. Let’s face it: our UX was really messy. There was way too much of “where the he** am I now?”, so the update was long overdue!
All we do, is to make it easier for you to find what you need, share what you know, and give you more value with each visit to MaterialUp, SiteUp or iOSUp. And we’re really grateful that you stuck around and managed your way through until today :)
In all honesty, we too are very attached to those little urls, especially materialup.com. But that’s ok, we can survive that can’t we?! :)
So what’s new?
The Homepage for a start! This one was pickle but we managed to make it clear while giving you as much value as possible. Hopefully you think so to!
We also merged our Markets to create one large UpLabs Market for all styles and environments (iOS, Android and web). In it we list a selection of quality products to help designers and developers build their next app or site project. And like everything on UpLabs, you’ll only find stunning designs ✨
Feedback?
If you’ve ever thought of sending us a quick email to give us your 2c, now is the time! Seriously, we can’t build this without you. Please please please let us know what you think, the good and the bad, what sucks, what’s awesome, what needs to stay and what we can all compromise on letting go of :)
Special thanks
To Dwinawan Hariwijaya for re-designing our website — we love working with you!
To the Aerolab team whose thoughtful work on our website continues to influence our decisions today, both in product and design.
To many of our early users who are always ready to give us feedback on big and small matters — you will recognize who you are :)
