The thing with user-generated content is that it can look ugly. When your app fetches this type of content and you care about the app’s brand aesthetics, you have to think of ways to make user-generated content beautiful. How do you do this? Well, glad you didn’t ask, but I’ll share anyway…
Option 1. Don’t show it. Done. Haha, yeah, seriously. When you have people issuing a ton of badges and your idea is to show them in the profile… don’t. Instead, hide them into a badge tab that doesn’t show all the badges every time you look at someone’s profile. Bonus to that is that you also improve performance of that app view (fewer things to load).
Option 2: Don’t let user add anything they like. Hahah… Yes, seriously. Instead of allowing users to add anything they like, create assets for them. This way you ensure quality of assets. Consider creating sets of assets for diverse looks. I don’t have a social context example right now, but that is one way of handling it.
Option 3: Force users to upload higher quality images. Again, this is not pertaining to the social use case, but you can require users to meet minimum image resolutions / dimensions and even share guidelines as to types of images that work best.
Option 4: Curate. In apps where content is shown to visitors right away, you can manually curate for the best quality and show that first.
Option 5: Stop caring if things look ugly. Let it go! It’s out of your control now. Forget it. Let them do as they please! 😅
Personally, I try to go for option 1. Don’t show anything that is not necessary to see in a default view that everyone will access immediately. Tuck it into a tab, a modal, something.. anything that doesn’t require constant interaction. Curation is also great where applicable.
In many cases, you can’t do anything about it. Social profiles are one example. You can’t do much to make someone’s custom image or profile look good. You CAN offer themes and color palettes and pre-made profile images and banners. But, once they change it, that’s that.
Did I miss anything?
