LukeW | Information Resolution on the Windows Phone 7 Series

> The Windows Phone 7 Series begins with a top-level navigation menu consisting of three options. A quick tap on “albums” brings up a similar listing of images but with substantially more interface elements. It’s also a bit unclear if all the pictures in an album will be listed in this view or if another tap on the album title is required (adding a third step to the navigation process). This article reminded me of the old story about Palm, who supposedly had an employee whose entire job it was to “count taps” in the Palm OS. If it took too many taps to get to the thing the user wanted, the designers had to go back to the drawing board and find a more efficient way.

The iPhone sometimes has issues with this, of course. (Switching between different email account inboxes comes to mind as one of my biggest pet peeves.) But in general, the iPhone OS is pretty efficient, in terms of limiting the number of taps to get to the content. And, as this article suggests, iPhone OS has great “Information Resolution.” The content, more often than not, becomes the interface, or at least the interface is minimized as much as possible.

I think we know too little right now about Windows Phone Series 7 (other than that the name sucks) to make a good judgement call about its future. But from what I’ve seen of the user interface, I have to agree that Microsoft has made a few design choices that are clearly form over function. They try too hard to make it pretty, rather than making it efficient and intuitive.

Even the fact that it has 3 static user buttons (Start, Bing, and Back) as compared to Apple’s 1 (Home) is evidence of this. Not all apps need back buttons, and the ones that do can add them for themselves. And the Bing button is just another example of Microsoft pushing its own technologies on you for no good reason whatsoever.

Imagine the outcry if Apple had put a dedicated iTunes hardware button on every iPhone.

Microsoft has never been any good at simple, efficient, elegant, yet powerful. Either it’s super powerful but ugly as sin (Windows), or it’s oversimplified to the point of being inefficient (Zune).

I do give them credit for finally doing something different in this space. This is no direct copy of the iPhone or Android. And I’m glad they seem to get the importance of a unified user experience, which is why they won’t allow third parties to hack the UI on a whim. (Can’t wait to hear what the “open” community thinks of that.) But in many ways, Microsoft is starting over from zero with this project, and they’re more than 3 years behind everyone else. So it’s far from clear how successful they will be.