4 ms·

I feel like there are a lot of really solid, user-focused features that windows phone nailed, that now seem basically lost

by rmorey 8y ago

exergy 8y ago
Yep, like all the actions at the bottom of the screen where you could most easily reach them, unlike iOS which places the back button (gesture notwithstanding) at the top left! One of the Windows Phone's designers had a really insightful article [1] about how they designed windows phone fundamentally for a technology native who doesn't need shitty metaphorical leather textures on his glass screen calendar. It is where the famous movement against skeumorphism started (and thank god for that!). WP was doing flat design before it was cool. On an old MSDN post (maybe?) I remember reading that the inspiration for the Live Tiles was a user whose central interest was to use the phone as liitle as possible to do his task as quickly as he could before he rapidly replaced the phone back into his pocket to get on with real life. I remember creating a new calendar entry in WP7 took three taps from start to finish, not counting typing out the title. There weren't many other fields to fill besides the Title of the entry and the time/date, and it set a default reminder time of 15 minutes before start time. Perfection. Before facebook and the rest dragged the carpet out from under them, you could get your twitter and facebook feed within the contacts app so you could get it all in one place. Edited to add: I'm on a bit of a love fest venting session so here's more. WP designers recognized that OLEDs were amazing, so they made the phone White Text on Black from the get go! Thus, great battery life. Further, all the icons were also uniformly coloured, making the whole experience so cohesive. All the apps also looked like all the others, so the learning curve was nonexistent. They recognized how little juice engineers of android could suck out of their bloated multi core processors, so they made their phones work phenomenally well on even shitty, single core processors. I fucking loved windows phone's early verions. It's a shame they've gone away. But an even bigger shame that they had no confidence in their original designers, and ended up adapting the hideous, appalling, atrocious, fucking retarded hamburger menu before they went away. [1] http://kruzeniski.com/how-print-design-is-the-future-of-interaction http://kruzeniski.com/how-print-design-is-the-future-of-inte...
- headsoup 8y ago
  I also was a big fan of Windows Phone. It was a good OS and the live-tile interface was brilliant. Also agree the introduction of the hamburger menu was confusing and pointless in replacing something that worked. I don't think MS had any confidence in anything they were doing over that time because they never seemed to properly commit to anything. Win Phone could have been bigger and competitive if they'd focused effort on it (marketing - and no not MS's standard marketing 'quality,' app dev funding, etc)
  - Pxtl 8y ago
    Seriously. They should be launched like a gaming portable with the phone OS. An xbox branded Nokia answer to the Xperia play.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > Yep, like all the actions at the bottom of the screen where you could most easily reach them, unlike iOS which places the back button (gesture notwithstanding) at the top left! On early iPhones this was within the reach of the thumb. On later iPhones they introduced the swipe to solve the issue posed by larger screens.
- yks 8y ago
  > WP was doing flat design before it was cool. it was somewhat annoying to watch the community go religious on flat design when "Apple invented it"
  - Pxtl 8y ago
    Hah, it's funny - when iOS 8 came out I noticed that a lot of the screenshots were nearly indistinguishable from WP with the background switched to white.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Hey, I thought Google invented flat! /s Seriously though, Windows phones sucked for many reasons (including lack of exposed features in the OS, especially in first versions, and of course lack of apps in general), but UX wasn't one of them. I guess they failed in releasing too much of an MVP, and then not following through properly. I continue to claim that Microsoft had a great UX vision for mobile, and that they're the only one with an OS that can turn tablets from consumption devices into productive tools.
christophilus 8y ago
I had an early Windows phone and loved it. It had crazy good battery life. It made common action super efficient. It got out of my way. It organized all my social media so, so well. Its autocomplete when typing was better than anything I've used to date (though, I hear it actually worsened over time). I miss that phone.
- FridgeSeal 8y ago
  Seconding the keyboard: perfect spacing, pleasing fonts, fast animations and responsive feeling and hands down the best text prediction I’ve ever used: best suggestions, best balance between aggression and accuracy. You could write a word and have it return any matching emoji’s literally years before Android or iOS.
obelix_ 8y ago
Cut copy paste was best on win phone.

I feel like there are a lot of really solid, user-focused features that windows phone nailed, that now seem basically lost

by rmorey 8y ago

I feel like there are a lot of really solid, user-focused features that windows phone nailed, that now seem basically lost

exergy 8y ago

Yep, like all the actions at the bottom of the screen where you could most easily reach them, unlike iOS which places the back button (gesture notwithstanding) at the top left! One of the Windows Phone's designers had a really insightful article [1] about how they designed windows phone fundamentally for a technology native who doesn't need shitty metaphorical leather textures on his glass screen calendar. It is where the famous movement against skeumorphism started (and thank god for that!). WP was doing flat design before it was cool. On an old MSDN post (maybe?) I remember reading that the inspiration for the Live Tiles was a user whose central interest was to use the phone as liitle as possible to do his task as quickly as he could before he rapidly replaced the phone back into his pocket to get on with real life. I remember creating a new calendar entry in WP7 took three taps from start to finish, not counting typing out the title. There weren't many other fields to fill besides the Title of the entry and the time/date, and it set a default reminder time of 15 minutes before start time. Perfection. Before facebook and the rest dragged the carpet out from under them, you could get your twitter and facebook feed within the contacts app so you could get it all in one place. Edited to add: I'm on a bit of a love fest venting session so here's more. WP designers recognized that OLEDs were amazing, so they made the phone White Text on Black from the get go! Thus, great battery life. Further, all the icons were also uniformly coloured, making the whole experience so cohesive. All the apps also looked like all the others, so the learning curve was nonexistent. They recognized how little juice engineers of android could suck out of their bloated multi core processors, so they made their phones work phenomenally well on even shitty, single core processors. I fucking loved windows phone's early verions. It's a shame they've gone away. But an even bigger shame that they had no confidence in their original designers, and ended up adapting the hideous, appalling, atrocious, fucking retarded hamburger menu before they went away. [1] http://kruzeniski.com/how-print-design-is-the-future-of-interaction http://kruzeniski.com/how-print-design-is-the-future-of-inte...

headsoup 8y ago
I also was a big fan of Windows Phone. It was a good OS and the live-tile interface was brilliant. Also agree the introduction of the hamburger menu was confusing and pointless in replacing something that worked. I don't think MS had any confidence in anything they were doing over that time because they never seemed to properly commit to anything. Win Phone could have been bigger and competitive if they'd focused effort on it (marketing - and no not MS's standard marketing 'quality,' app dev funding, etc)
- Pxtl 8y ago
  Seriously. They should be launched like a gaming portable with the phone OS. An xbox branded Nokia answer to the Xperia play.
saagarjha 8y ago
> Yep, like all the actions at the bottom of the screen where you could most easily reach them, unlike iOS which places the back button (gesture notwithstanding) at the top left! On early iPhones this was within the reach of the thumb. On later iPhones they introduced the swipe to solve the issue posed by larger screens.
yks 8y ago
> WP was doing flat design before it was cool. it was somewhat annoying to watch the community go religious on flat design when "Apple invented it"
- Pxtl 8y ago
  Hah, it's funny - when iOS 8 came out I noticed that a lot of the screenshots were nearly indistinguishable from WP with the background switched to white.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Hey, I thought Google invented flat! /s Seriously though, Windows phones sucked for many reasons (including lack of exposed features in the OS, especially in first versions, and of course lack of apps in general), but UX wasn't one of them. I guess they failed in releasing too much of an MVP, and then not following through properly. I continue to claim that Microsoft had a great UX vision for mobile, and that they're the only one with an OS that can turn tablets from consumption devices into productive tools.

christophilus 8y ago

I had an early Windows phone and loved it. It had crazy good battery life. It made common action super efficient. It got out of my way. It organized all my social media so, so well. Its autocomplete when typing was better than anything I've used to date (though, I hear it actually worsened over time). I miss that phone.

FridgeSeal 8y ago
Seconding the keyboard: perfect spacing, pleasing fonts, fast animations and responsive feeling and hands down the best text prediction I’ve ever used: best suggestions, best balance between aggression and accuracy. You could write a word and have it return any matching emoji’s literally years before Android or iOS.

obelix_ 8y ago

Cut copy paste was best on win phone.