iPhone Home Screen Experiment: Day 1
Like many iPhone owners, I have far too many apps on my phone. Taking a leaf out of Patrick Rhones' book, I have embarked on a mission to slim down my home screen.
Yesterday I started by moving all the icons off the first screen, with the exception of the dock which I use regularly. As I find myself using an app multiple times during the day, I move it back.
The results after day one are fairly predictable. Foursquare, Facebook, Tweetie and Maps have made it back to the home screen. All apps which are part of my social periscope and see regular use. It will be interesting to see what happens tomorrow when I am back at work - will any productivity apps move to the front?
As well as yielding interesting insights into which iPhone apps have the most stickiness, experiments like this are also a reflection on the UI design of the iPhone as a whole. Whilst Springboard is a simple and effective way of launching apps it is painfully obvious that it does not scale. The success of the App Store is beyond Apple's wildest dreams, and having 100,000 apps at everyones fingertips is exposing this as a serious problem.
I think its a given that iPhone OS 4.0, which will likely be previewed this coming Wednesday, will attempt to address this with either a totally redesigned springboard or at the very least some UI enhancements.
Lets consider what Apple's engineers can do to improve things:
- Folders. An obvious one, with so many apps some form of grouping would be entirely logical. As a user, a way to organize all apps of a similar type, such as games, into a folder would be invaluable. Several solutions to this exist in the Jailbreak community, though so far they have all been lacking - missing the sexy UI touches for navigation and management which we could hope to expect from Apple.
- Stacks. Introduced in Leopard, Stacks have been fairly interesting in terms of UI - proving themselves great for showing small collections of items such as recent downloads, but falling down to some extent when navigating larger sets. I can see this metaphor working well on the iPhone, with icons erupting from the dock, perhaps showing popular applications or those with active notifications.
- Magic Pages. Apple could try and replicate this very experiment, and also borrow from the folders concept - creating home screen pages which automatically show the most popular applications, or specific categories. After all, why rely on the user to organize their collections when the software can add a little helping hand.
I'm sure there are a lot more directions to go and I'll post more as I post updates on my home screen experiment. If you have any thoughts, why not leave a comment
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