An application’s home view is generally a small view that provides personal aggregated content specific to a user. In other words, the home view cannot be accessed by any of the user’s friends or connections. For the most part, this type of view is the main interaction that the user has with the particular container, providing an aggregate feed of the activities of his connections, upcoming events, pictures, etc. Depending on the container that hosts this type of view, numerous applications may be displayed to the user in this view. Figure 1-5 shows its placement within the container.

Figure 1-5. The application home view

The home view also typically offers a small window view into the full application. Quite often, the container imposes restrictions on this view, such as limiting the markup that may be used to HTML, CSS, and some secure, container-defined tags that provide access to social information like invite drop-down lists, user data, etc. Many containers highly regulate the use of JavaScript and Flash due to performance and security concerns.

Since this view is often the user’s first interaction with your application in the container, it is vitally important that it provide as much functionality as possible to draw a user in to one of the more extensive application views. If a small view contains a number of the aforementioned restrictions, many developers will mostly ignore it, opting to devote the majority of their time and attention to the fully featured view. In a vast number of cases, this means that the small view becomes an afterthought and usually just contains a number of calls to action for users to go to the canvas view, without adding any incentive for them to actually do so.

Any view that helps form a user’s first impression of your application should warrant as much of your attention as the full feature set of the application. I can’t stress this point enough: devoting proper attention to a small view can increase daily active use of your application, drive engagement, and ultimately add users and increase monetization potential.

Any application small view should provide compelling and engaging content (e.g., new activities that users can do in the application), should never be a direct copy of the canvas view, and should provide enough base-level functionality that users do not have to fully engage with the application to get some value.