Extending Windows Phone 7
Microsoft is off to a good start with Windows Phone 7, but there is of course a lot more work to do. Some of it is rather obvious and is included in every single preview article on the web (Twitter integration/app, better multitasking for 3rd party apps, clipboard support). What every article does not do is go into suggesting how Microsoft might want to achieve these things. I understand the futility of doing this, as the design of new WP7 functionality is not by community consensus - it is done by a (small) paid team of engineers/designers/developers at the company. However, I’m a sucker for this kind of speculative thinking, so I thought I’d take a crack at it. I also wanted to address some of less obvious aspects of how the design might fit into the “Metro” style. Now, I wanted to create mock-ups for everything, but it was holding me back from posting sooner. So, I’ll do my best to help you visualize in text what I’m trying to say. Eventually, I might add the mock-ups, but if someone wants to help me with this, then just give me a shout out on Twitter or leave a comment on this post.
1. Quick access to universal search for data on the phone.
Microsoft built a Bing button into every WP7 device. It is supposed to be contextual. Press it within a hub or app to search within that data-set. From the Start screen, within IE mobile and any app that doesn’t implement a custom action for that button, if you press it, you are taken to the “Bing app”. That app is fairly limited - it only lets you flip between the local listings, web results and news categories. Otherwise it relies on smart interpretation of queries to provide special results e.g. movie show-times, weather forecast, maps, flight status etc. Of course, this results in some functionality being inaccessible. For instance, shopping results don’t show up as they do on the desktop. There is no way to search your contact’s status updates (clicking the search button in the people hub only searches your contacts). Pressing search in IE doesn’t search your history & favorites, rather it takes you to the Bing app. There is no place for combined search results from your phone (including apps, e-mail, appointments, 3rd party app data etc.) The best way to make this available?
A. From the Start screen:
Make the Bing app a hub. Make Local, Web & News “tabs” on the left-most view of the panorama. Swipe to the right and you get the Images, Video & Music, swipe again to get Social, Health & Shopping. Long-press/double-click the search button, and you get universal phone data search. Swipe to the right to search data from particular apps which must explicitly enable this to show up here.
B. Make contextual search “really, really work”:
There are a lot of places which could use contextual search, where currently you are taken to Bing. e.g. IE favorites. Fix these spots.
2. App-switching
There is no simple way to switch between apps on WP7, definitely none that is scalable. Right now, you are restricted to keep pressing the back button in hopes that after you get through all of an apps screens in reverse, you find yourself in the right place. And what happens when you get there and want to go to another app? Does the back button follow a “unidirectional fixed timeline” or a “loop back to last action, bidirectional timeline”. Problems, problems, problems. Yes, you can go back to the Start screen with the Windows button. That is restricted to a limited number of tiles. Okay, you say, maybe I’ll swipe to the right again and again to get to the app list & search for the one I want and tap it. How do you know that you were using that app and not another and not make it an annoyingly convoluted process?
Easy. Double-click/Long-press the Back button and get an “app-switcher” screen. This could list the apps you’ve been using in the last few hours (alphabetical view), or your most recently used apps (timeline view) or the ones that are still running background threads (switcher view … if more multitasking APIs like the ones in iOS 4 or music+video hub are introduced). You could make it a hub & then you could include all of these categories. Of course, the search button would work here contextually.
3. Making installed apps more discoverable.
Enable contextual search in the app-list to the right of the Start-screen. The list screen should initially display sort-order options instead of the list (e.g Recently installed, Recently updated, Frequently used, Alphabetical, Categories in a style similar to how the Zune part of the music+video hub has music, video, podcasts etc. listed). Click on a sort-order like Categories & you get into a panorama which allows swiping sideways between categories, Alphabetical could split into sets of first-alphabets, Recently … into pages by recency etc.). This is easier to understand with a mock-up.
4. Backgrounding APIs
The music+video hub already automatically enables background audio and new/pinned/history/now-playing updates for app submitted to the marketplace that are primarily media-related. The same idea (taking a page out of Apple’s playbook) can be extended to VOIP apps through making the Phone screen a panorama, with apps showing on swiping to the right, and given background “phone” (mic+speaker+WiFi/3G) access & updating of recent calls/pinned contacts/new contacts areas. This would also be the right place to add video-calling apps & not in the camera app. Location is another obvious background-thread, maybe through the maps app or the Bing hub (as described in point 1. above). WP7 already does dehydrate/rehydrate or tombstoning or saved-states out of the box. I already described background thread running apps being shown in the “app-switcher” in point 2. above. Local notifications should be fairly easy, considering notification toasts & live tiles are a WP7 keystone design feature.
5. Clipboard
COMING SOON ;-)
