Widgets Are Boring And HTC Thinks BlinkFeed Is The Cure
HTC’s Assistant Vice President of User Experience Drew Bamford recently wrote up an interesting post on HTC’s blog, explaining the design philosophy of the company’s fifth iteration of Sense. Sense has been one of the few custom user interfaces built by phone manufacturers that could be considered by some to be preferable over stock Android, and we have seen the company make some bold, innovative moves over the years with the Android skin.
With the company’s recent release of the HTC One, we have seen a brand new version of Sense, which is promised to come to last year’s product releases such as the One X and S as well. As you may have read on this blog, there are some pretty major additions to this year’s update, including the Zoe camera, BoomSound, and BlinkFeed.
In designing Sense 5, Bamford claims he and his team took a step back and felt it was imperative to take a “fresh look at the overall customer experience”. As part of the design process, the company conducted research to “dramatically reinvent HTC Sense”. In its findings, the company uncovered three consistent patterns the company claims to be characteristic of the modern Android user:
1. Apps Vs. Widgets
To start off, Bamford says that “most people don’t differentiate between apps and widgets”. This is due to the fact that we have had the ability to resize widgets on our home screens since the release of Android 4.1. It is easy to forget that this is something HTC introduced in its first version of Sense, long before we were talking about Jelly Bean. Many widgets, when resized to take up the whole screen, offer a similar user experience to what we see when the app is opened instead.
2. People Don’t Use Widgets
Bamford goes on to point out that for many of us, “widgets aren’t widely used”. He concedes that while weather, clock and music are the most popular, after that, fewer than 10% of customers use any other widgets. This is definitely true in my experience, as I find that almost all widgets that do not resemble the app experience to be rather useless.
3. Home Screens Don’t Change
Thirdly, the research findings claim that most of us don’t modify our home screens very often. In fact, after the first month of use, approximately 80% of us don’t change our home screens any more. Once again, I would have to agree with Bamford as I have had pretty much the same home screen for the past two years, set up with the apps I use most, on all my Android phones.
As such, HTC has taken the above findings into consideration for what they believe to be a vastly superior user experience in Sense 5. BlinkFeed is their home screen solution, taking up one screen, only a swipe away from what you’re normally used to with Android. It compiles user-configured news and media into a Flipboard-style window pane. According to Bamford, “Now, every time you power on your new HTC One you’ll see fresh content – whether it is from your friends, your social feeds, or our premier content partners – that is uniquely relevant to you.”
It sounds like something I could get into myself, providing that the list of HTC’s “premium content providers” grows in membership. Perhaps what may be the end result of all this is as opposed to widgets, apps will be able to take up full homescreens, something that I would love to see from the likes of Twitter and Google+. Who knows, maybe this is already in store for us in Key Lime Pie.
In any case, I can’t wait to get my hands on the One to try it out and let you know of my thoughts. A review will be coming up on Android in Canada in the next few weeks.
[HTC Blog]