Idea: Dynamic icons and lists can increase productivity
By Stefan Constantinescu on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 4:51 PM PST In Ideas and rants
If a music player can know what songs I like by the number of times I play a certain song … why can’t a smartphone know what I like to do with my it by tracking my work flow?
My hand already knows: hit the menu key, down 2, over 3, hit enter on the joystick and my phone now does something.
Why does it have to be like that? Windows XP has the "most used applications" thing going on in its smart start bar, why can’t something similar be adapted to a phone?
Everyone uses a phone differently, yet we all adapt to our phones strict menu hierarchy … why is it in 2007 our phones can’t adapt to what we want to do with them?
I really wish the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) User Experience team, if such a team exists, started a blog. I’m not talking about the guys who make the UI, I’m talking about the guys who dictate the menu structures, icon placement, the guys responsible for making everything "feel" right. I’ll come back to the iPod analogy, there were a lot of MP3 players before the iPod, and a lot were released after the iPod. The ease of use, drain dead simple UI is what shoehorned it’s success in the market and locked it in.
I don’t know about you, but the first thing I do after I get all my apps installed is spend about half an hour re-organizing the menu of my S60 phone to be how I want it. I create special folders, delete some, and put things in the folders where I think they should be.
It’s not automatic, like you’re wanting, but I think there’s a benefit to me putting it how I want it – it won’t change. One thing I HATE about Windows Mobile devices is that stupid program bar at the top that changes as you use stuff. I don’t want to have to guess how to get to an app that I don’t use on a daily basis. I like to set stuff where I want it so that I know exactly how to get there when I want to.
Well S60 does have that home row of applications you can customize yourself. Although it is a pain in the ass that I can only have 7 applications over there.