The Case for Too Many Mobile Apps

One point of contention with my usage of the iPhone is that I'm one of those people with so many apps, to the point of reaching the nine screens limit characteristic of the OS prior to the version 3.0 release last week.

One of the common rhetorical questions laid about before me was whether I actually use all the applications on my smartphone. This is a fair question, and the answer remains that it indeed comes down to a handful of applications I can honestly categorize under frequent usage.

The Desktop Analogy and Occasional Use

But that's the thing - frequency of use. Users like myself like to treat their smartphones more as portable computers than just powerful phones. That is, people like me want all the occasional-use applications on the phone, just in case. It would be analogous to the myriad of applications installed on a Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop environment. I may not burn DVDs or CDs on a daily basis, but I'm not going to reinstall Nero Burning ROM every other month for each time I need to burn an optical disc. Likewise, I'm not going to reinstall an ATM Hunter app or Starmap app every time I occasionally need it.

The last thing a user wants to do the moment a task needs to be done is to install and configure settings. (In general, desktop software and mobile apps lose some or all customizations and data upon removal.) Essentially, it's all about the convenience of having the tools and resources you need available to you, even if you only use them once in a while.

It can seem overwhelming to an observer seeing a user swipe across eight or nine screens of apps on an iPhone, and it's certainly valid that it can look like a random mess. It requires relying on memory of where a particular app sits (turns out to be easy for the primary user, but slower for guest users), as well as reorganization of their icon order on the pages. For example, there seems to be this trend of people sorting by a gradient of usage frequency, with the most used apps on the home screen, and gradually sorted towards the least used apps on the last screens.

Search versus Browse, and Low-Use Applications

In the case of this phone, there's no function to sort all apps by name or any attribute, but the default behavior is that any new app gets placed at the end, or in the first gap on a screen's icon grid. That effectively sorts by last added. If you're installing all applications in a huge batch, such as if syncing for the very first time with apps all sync-ready in iTunes, then they install in alphabetical order by name. Beyond that though, it's all manual sorting.

So when version 3.0 released with its Spotlight global search feature and removal of the cap on number of apps, the iPhone OS seemed to step closer to this desktop computing behavior. The search versus browse mentality is very much like the live global search on a desktop platform, such as with Spotlight on the OS X menu bar and Windows Search in the Windows Vista/7 taskbar. You still browse for applications (and anything else from emails to calendar events), but for anything further out of reach, such as low-usage applications, the search part of the hybrid system comes in handy.

Linear Browsing versus Planar Browsing

It's also worth noting that another suggestion I've come across is to allow vertical swipes for vertical pages/screens, whereas the iPhone OS maintains a horizontal row of pages that only move left and right, with dot indicators at the bottom to show the current position. This is a linear approach. It has its cons, but it's arguably easier to keep track. Typically, most other phones offer a single tall vertical page with scrolling for all applications, and movement is also linear, with the scrollbar being the indicator of position.

The Palm Pre takes a different approach with a grid of screens of icon grids. This could potentially mean less swipes when browsing, provided the user can keep track of position. There are stick indicators showing where you are on the grid. This remotely like organizing by workspaces in Linux or Spaces in OS X, and its only limit is how much the user can remember about the position of a specific app in a cartesian plane instead of a linear. The question then becomes what the threshold is for how much we can handle - 2x2, 3x3, 4x4? Will a user remember that the Pandora app was on the Marsha part of the Brady Bunch grid? Or was it the Cindy part of the grid? We risk confusion, but it's an expense for the gain of quicker movement on a 2D plane. In some ways, this kind of planar browsing is much like that of desktop computing, except with a much more limited screen size to do it, so we'll see how that plays out.

Convergence

For years and years, people and the media alike have been talking about the convergence of many different kinds of devices into one, for better or worse. In the case of the mobile devices, its evolution towards becoming more desktop-like is one part of this continual convergence, not necessarily towards one single device for all, but certainly towards the further blurring of the lines between them all.

Blast from the Past: Oversights in the Motorola Razr V3 Interface

Before any organized effort like Bleuprints, I wrote these scattered design muses under the label "blurbs".
Here is one I wrote in 2007, towards the end of my experience with the Motorola Razr V3, and prior to owning the Razr V3xx (a future device that would finally fix some of the issues I mentioned). The iPhone solved many of the gripes I had with mobile phone UI's in general, which was largely why I loved it so much. Its announcement prompted me to write out what had been frustrating me about the status quo during my ownership of the Razr's.

"Oversights in the Motorola Razr V3 Interface"
August 3, 2007, from yours truly, Gordon

The following are some highlighted interface oversights I noticed when I first got the now widespread Motorola Razr V3 back in 2005. I've upgraded my firmware multiple times with the hope that perhaps Moto developers had addressed these issues since then, but to no avail. I've contacted Motorola directly, and they respond as though they don't see these as shortcomings.

Why is this important? Well, first off, Motorola clearly isn't listening, and hasn't provided easy feedback channels to their developers, and that's a shame because the shape of this anodized aluminum exterior and its keypad design are absolutely gorgeous. Yet more importantly, this mobile operating system appears to be used on most other Motorola phones, like the clamshell V551 that my sister owns.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Above: Clock hidden from view during phone call

During a phone call, someone might ask you if you can meet them at 4pm. You check down at your phone, your sole time piece nowadays, only to discover that the "Calling" half-screen is blocking the clock from view. Yet Motorola does not allow you the option to move the clock anywhere beyond the lower right hand corner. With all that space at the top, they could have allowed the time to be positioned anywhere at the top, where the date currently sits.

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Above and Below: Inconsistency - Inability to rename pictures in viewing mode menu

You've taken some photos with your camera phone, and you want to name them. Yet sometimes the tiny thumbnails in the main pictures gallery (Fig. 3) are unidentifiable for naming, so you select a picture and "View". Now that it's clearer what this photo was (Fig. 5), you access this individual photo's menu (Fig. 6), only to realize that there's no "Rename" option. In order to name this photo, you must select "Back" twice, access the menu, and rename from this main menu (Fig. 4). That's two extra steps every time. If you're naming the last ten photos you just took, that amounts to a lot of wasted time and finger movements.

Fig. 5

Fig. 6

Fig. 7

Fig. 8

Above: Extra steps in saving freshly taken camera pics

Every time you've just snapped a photo with your camera phone, a screen (Fig. 7) pops up asking whether you want to "Store" or "Discard". This decision has some logic behind it, because you'd want to discard bad takes immediately. Some cameraphones prefer to save your snapshot right away and let you decide how to use it later, such as with Nokia. That way, you won't lose your snapshot if someone happens to call you right as you're trying to save it. Saving is not even a one-step process because Motorola assumes that you want to send every photo you take in a text/e-mail message. So to save a photo, you must "Store", arrow down to "Store In". If it's a passing moment you're trying to capture, you can forget about making the subsequent shots in time. Or let's take it up another level - about half the people I see on vacation snap photos with their phones. Imagine if you asked someone to take a photo of you, and then you wanted the conventional "one more" shot. Unless they're familiar with this Motorola interface, you're in for some extra minor hassles - "Did I take it? How do I save this?".


Exterior: Gorgeous and well thought-out

Quirks in the interface aside, this device's innards are housed in a slim exterior (finally, reduced pocket bulge), an anodized aluminum surface like the iPod Mini and iPod Nano 2G (finally, grease resistance and easier to the touch), no bulgy stick antenna on the top (finally built in as part of the look on the bottom), and a styled keypad (notice the consistent typeface usage, the green button symbolizing "talk" with a telephone icon with an emanating wave of talk, and the red button symbolizing "off" with the hung-up handset resting on the body of the phone), to name a few. Sure, there are a few decision quirks on the exterior end as well, such as the "Internet" key, which most people would find less useful than a "camera" key (later adopted on other Razr models). You can tell that the designers behind this weren't sloppy with the curves, as you can tell by how how neatly and naturally all the lines sweep and come together at the hinges/camera and battery door, and the between the top lid and bottom antenna. Nothing juts out, not even the integrated loop for string-attached decorations. This was the phone that melted away my original perception of the flip phone as a bulky, generic grease magnet of gray boredom, and I thank you Motorola for getting that part right. Now about that interface...

From Tabs to Thumbnails, and Back

The screenshots tell it all. The Opera 10 beta browser has a vertically resizable tab bar that turns into page thumbnails as they are expanded. To me, this is the most graceful approach I've seen towards representing open pages as thumbnails because it doesn't interrupt the view of the current page beyond what you control, in contrast to a full page grid of thumbs. I'm curious to see whether this takes off beyond the web browser into other tabbed applications.

Working Within the iPhone OS Icons Restrictions

One of the signature visuals of the iPhone OS is the simple half-gloss rounded rectangle shape every icon takes. When the phone came out a couple years ago, I had initial reservations about how this template might encourage developers to make every icon look too similar with regards to creativity. I tried to deduce a good reason why they might have chosen that route, and I concluded that perhaps they a.) wanted to lower the barriers by making icon development easier for developers, and b.) wanted to prevent certain arrangements of contrasting icon shapes from making any particular sequence look strange on a grid. There wasn't an answer in the Developer Connection Human Interface Guidelines either, but it did seem to suggest that developers were supposed to create non-glossy square images for (I assume) to be later processed for uniform corners and gloss treatment.

Nevertheless, I love the challenge of working with restrictions such as the rounded template, so I was struck in the very beginning over how someone used the rounded corners as the rounded edges of a retro television set for the YouTube icon, and then again just last week over the imeem icon using the tapered edges of an audio cassette.

This is not to say that people haven't broken out of the rounded boxes mentality (see the WordFu icon), but to maintain the exact template shape to make it work with your design is the best kind.

Am I the only one who noticed this? Safari 4's Tabs Bar Lost Multitasking

I previously mentioned how Safari 4 Beta had stepped up their spillover tabs menu oversight by moving you to the area of the tab bar where your active tab sits, so that you could see its neighboring tabs. Suddenly, tabs that didn't fit on the visible part of the tab bar weren't segregated into an inaccessible menu.

This was what the Safari team gave us with Safari 4 Beta:


(To jog your memory, notice that wherever you are, the whiter part of the contextual menu shows which part of the tab bar is visible, and it would move you to that section of the tab bar.)

This is what happened when Safari 4 officially came out:


(Now we're back to being fixed at the front of the tab bar, and only one tab from the contextual menu can show up in the visible part of the tab bar at a time - at the very end of the tab bar. So if I selected the hidden spilled-over 16th "Flickr" tab, it would appear at the end of the visible tab section, beside the 10th "Google" tab. That misrepresents the sequence of the tabs, and reduces what we can do with it when moving tabs around.)

They quietly removed it, and while the blogosphere and media seem to be talking about the Safari 4 official release version, nobody seems to be talking about this. Am I the only one who noticed this? Surely I'm not the only detail-oriented person around here. Maybe all the designers out there just haven't noticed this yet. What a step backwards. My only redemption is that we now have access to the Chrome developer preview for OS X.

Thoughtfulness Zen of the Moment 2

There are plenty of things I like about Google Chrome, but one of the things I just noticed was that if you maximize the window, the draggable area above the tabs vanishes. That makes sense because you can't drag around a maximized window.




Also on the list of reasons of why I still like Chrome as a general use browser:

download manager saves and runs files without extra popup windows or download list windows (without requiring plugins). Opera comes the closest to this behavior, but still lacks the bar at the bottom, which I've only seen in the form of third party plugins

color coding and fading of URL text to distinguish different parts of the address (protocol, secure protocol, main domain...)

main bookmarks are an extension of the toolbar bookmarks, instead of the other way around

easy tabs/windows management, thanks to the wide draggable tab areas and long draggable window area (example of badly done implementation: Safari 4 Beta)

right sizes, proportions, and colors of the minimalist browser chrome

and plenty of other little details, in both UI/functionality and speed, but who could forget one of my favorites: separate processes for each tab, because I've had single tabs crash my entire browser with ten, twenty, forty tabs open