As I said in my ‘lite’ review of the HTC Hero, I would take about ‘Sense’ (which is the design approach of HTC to user experience) in a separate post – well this is that post!
So without further ado, I’ll let HTC explain more about the ‘Sense’ approach:
HTC Sense is focused on putting people at the centre, by making your phone work in a more simple and natural way. This experience revolves around three fundamental principles that were designed by quietly observing and listening to how people live and communicate: Make it Mine, Stay Close and Discover the Unexpected.
Make It Mine
Make It Mine is about feeling your HTC phone was created for and by you. To do this, HTC encourages you to dictate and organize how you want to access the people and content in your life in a way that fits best for you. For some, this means adding glance-view widgets that push content like twitter feeds, weather and other content to the surface while others may want quick access to business-focused information like email, calendar and world-times. HTC is also introducing a new profile feature called ‘Scenes’ that enables you to create different customized content profiles around specific functions or times in your life.
Stay Close
Today, staying in touch with the people in your life means managing a variety of communication channels and applications ranging from phone calls, emails, texts, photos, status updates and more. HTC Sense takes a different approach by integrating these communication channels and applications into one single view, enabling you to stay closer to your important people. With HTC Sense, friends’ Facebook status updates and photos, along with their Flickr photos are included alongside their text messages, emails and call history in a single view.
Discover the Unexpected
Many of the most memorable moments in your life are experienced, not explained. HTC Sense is focused on providing a variety of these simple yet innovative experiences on your HTC phone that will sometimes bring you moments of joy and delight. It can be something as basic as turning the phone over to silence a ring or as simple as improving the smart dialler for making calls quicker. HTC Sense also includes ‘Perspectives’, a new way for viewing your content such as email, photos, Twitter, music and more in different ways.
It’s good to see a company taking real time to try and ‘mind-map’ the ways in which people are using their devices these days – it certainly seems to have worked out in their case – the HTC Hero is a dream to use, thanks I think largely to the Sense approach to its UI.
So now you know – ‘Sense’ is the design approach to the UI – and expect to see a lot more in the way of Sense-inspired UIs coming out of HTC, and on to their devices, in the coming months.
Thanks to Jenna for the collateral 😉