No matter how you think people will use software you design and build, they will always surprise you; often in interesting ways. In the case of FeedLounge, our users are generally coming over from a previous feed reader and have a feed reading routine that they’ve developed with that software.

The feedback we get is always useful, and we then choose areas of FeedLounge to modify or enhance where we think another idea might be an improvement and try to improve transparency and usability in areas where we feel our implementation is a better solution.

Since much of the design of any program stems from the way the designer approaches the problem to be solved, I thought it might be interesting to discuss how I use FeedLounge.

I generally read feeds around three times a day:

• In the morning, I’ll read just the feeds I’m most interested in as I also sort through e-mails and other information that has come in overnight.
• In the afternoon when I decide I need a break from whatever I’m doing, I’ll generally read whatever looks interesting.
• In the evening, I’ll go through everything that is left unread from the day.

Often I will have kept up pretty well during the day and won’t have to play catch-up at night, but there are times where I’ll leave 100 items unread from certain feeds and go through them the next day.

FeedLounge has some features that make it easy for me to follow my daily workflow. Using tags to organize feeds is a really big help. I generally read my ‘a-list’ tagged feeds every morning, and I’ll normally get through my ‘blogs’ tag as well.

For my ‘a-list’ and ‘blogs’ feeds, I generally read through each item individually. I use the space bar and arrow keys to advance through each item and go to the next, tagging items I think I’ll want to access again in the future.

For my ‘tech’ and ‘news’ tags, I generally use the page up/down keys to quickly skim though the items. If I see one of interest, I’ll select it to read. Once I’ve made it through all of the unread headlines, I mark them all as read (K key).

How do you read your feeds?

This post is part of the project: FeedLounge. View the project timeline for more context on this post.