Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7S)
The WP7S layout and typography have a looseness found in posters, commercial art and marketing, an inappropriate metaphor for a handheld information and communication device. In the splashy panoramas, there are hints of design-by-focus-group (which is like hiring temps as your design consultants). Instead of impressing focus groups, designers should do a thought experiment: Imagine what Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive would have to say about your interface. As Jonathan Ive said: At Apple “we don’t do focus groups.”
The WP7S interface has an extra sequence/layer added by big-button opening screens for the new ways of organizing stuff. Compared to the IPhone, most of the WP7S organizing screens have lower content resolution, which violates flatness and leads to hierarchical stacking and temporal sequencing of screens. In day-to-day use, maybe the panorama screens will solve the stacking/sequencing problem, or maybe they will just clutter up the flow of information. Of course Microsoft’s customers are already familiar with deep layerings and complex hierarchies.
The panorama sequence appears to be an interface for an interface, a distancing from the core activities of users, who just want to get on with what they want to do. My view is to let the user’s eyes do more on a screen-image rich with opportunities rather than having to slide-and-flip through a sequence of thin decorative screens in order to find the desired action. The way to reduce clutter is not to thin down and sprawl out the content; instead fix the design. Clutter and confusion are not attributes of information, they are failures of design.
On the importance of content resolution and flatness in handheld devices, see my essay and video on iPhone design from January 2008.
The WP7S screens look as if they were designed for a slide presentation or for a video demo (to be read from a distance) and not for a handheld interface (read from 20 inches). For example, the headline type is too big, too spacious. One design lesson here is that most interface design work should be done at actual final scale and all internal demos should be on actual hardware rather than on pitch slides or big monitor screens. After all, users see the interface only at actual size, and so should interface designers, their managers, and so on up the management chain.
A recent unlocking of the WP7S emulator provides many many screens (perhaps all the screens in WP7S) that reinforce my concerns about low content resolution, flatness, and hierarchy. The typography is loose and over-produced, with big blimpy titles burning up content real-estate. The titling typography does not serve user needs or activities. Instead it is about its designer self, and looks like signage on the walls of a fashionable building. Good screen design for information/communication devices is all about the user and should be endlessly self-effacing. It is much more difficult to be user-friendly undesigny than designer-friendly designy.
The booming smartphone market is intensely competitive, with lots of talent, brains, money, and a vast infrastructure at hand. What is the positioning of WP7S in this market, where many users are enthusiastically committed to their new handheld devices? And how does WP7S compare with the well-established BlackBerry, iPhone, Nexus One, Android, as well as their upcoming new releases? Android is free, WP7S apparently has a license fee. Currently the two- and three-syllable platforms are way ahead of the seven-syllable platform.
NOTES
ET reports (favorably) on Microsoft’s Courier digital journal here.
Intriguing analysis by Luke Wroblewski on WP7S interface resolution.
WP7S is planned to launch late 2010, according to PC Magazine’s interesting article.
Engadget provides some WP7S images and a review.
