Best Practices

We strongly encourage developers to incorporate HootSuite's look and feel into their Apps to the highest acceptable extent in order to maximize user experience. Apps that fit into HootSuite's themes are most likely to leave a good impression with the user, which in turn contributes towards your App's success.

To make it easier for you to create a hoot-looking App, we have compiled a list of things that can be considered a QA guideline. We recommend to take notes of the list below.

QA Guideline

• Streams can be as narrow as 297px, including space taken by a scroll bar. On a Mac for example, the scrollbar narrows that number down to 282px
• Keep vertical space taken by a single message low - a stream is supposed to show multiple messages. Implement content expansion/toggling where adequate
• Message icons and headings should always open the same info popup with story/user/etc. details
• The time stamps below headings should always link out to the source article/discussion/etc.
• Clicking on a username or icon should always open a user info popup with user details
• Try to achieve as much functionality as possible through API functions (e.g. share to social networks via hsp.composeMessage)
• Implement 'infinite scrolling' while keeping a 'Show More' link at the bottom as a fall-back
• Suppress reloading of messages through refresh handlers (via hsp.bind) while the user interacts with the stream (e.g. posting messages, expanded details, possibly scroll position not near the top)