threegeesus iPhone followup: time to rework the home screen

Isaac on the phone

The nice thing about the iPhone v2 software, and the App Store, is all the clever, pretty apps.

The annoying thing about the iPhone v2 software, and the App Store, is all the clever, pretty apps.

This has all obviously been discussed to death, and I don't have much more to contribute on that angle, so I'll leave it at that.

But one of the less-noticed aspects of iPhone v2 and the plethora of App Store toys is that the "springboard" home screen interface from the original iPhone isn't scaling very well. Sure, it worked great at first, when the phone just shipped with 11 applications on top and another 4 on the "dock", and it was still fine when the default list grew to 13 -- even then there were blank slots to fill in, so no problem there.

The main screen started to become problematic when the 1.1.3 release in January 2008 allowed you to turn Safari bookmarks into tappable pseudo-apps, and in turn allowed you to set up multiple "pages" of icons. That was fine as long as you just had a handful of screens to deal with, but -- especially now that you can add both bookmarks and actual applications -- it really doesn't scale well at all if you start to have dozens of apps to keep track of.

On the Mac, handling lots of applications is no problem. They're all kept together in your /Applications folder (aka C:\Program Files for the Windows folks), the ones you're most interested in can be linked to from the Dock (aka the Start Menu), and the system is generally very efficient at letting you sift through to what you want. Not so on the iPhone now.

If I'm on the first screen on my phone right now, and I want to open up Shakespeare, I have to flick through five screens to get to it. So what had been a single action before -- "tap on icon" -- is now a six stage process -- "flick left, flick left, flick left, flick left, flick left, tap on icon" -- plus a much higher cognitive load, because, and here's the really fun part, things keep moving around, so you have to actually read through the intervening screens, just in case it changed.

The App Store application itself, as well as the link to it from iTunes back on the computer, has the ability to seek out & alert you to updated applications. Super. But when you download updates on the phone, it appears to create a second temporary copy of the app at the last screen, then either leaves it there at the end, or moves it back to the screen the original had been on.

If a screen ends up being asked to hold more than 16 apps, even temporarily, then things get out of whack. Let's say you're trying to reorganize an icon from screen 5 back to screen 3, but because screen 4 already has 16 icons, there's no room for the app we're moving to be stored there. "Who cares?," we ask, "it's not staying there anyway, right?" The phone cares, because you can't just go from screen 5 to screen 3 in one motion, you have to drag it over to the left, hover around the middle for a bit, then drag it over to the left again. In the interim, whatever you had at the lower-right corner of screen 4 gets bumped to the top-right corner of screen 5.

Okay, so you could get around that problem by leaving enough "holes" on the screen to keep that shuffling from happening. Fine. But it's already annoying enough as it is to have to go through 6 screens to find anything, padding it out will just mean even more screens to have to sift through. But it's worse than that, too, because if you download anything new, the phone will deposit the new icons on the leftmost screen with an empty slot to use, rather than the end of the list at the right. This approach seems reasonable and predictable, but if you can't remember what screens had free space, then this becomes unpredictable, and worse, it amplifies the problem of things seeming to jump around on you, especially as individual screens fill up.

On the other end of the equation, if having all these apps is more than you feel like dealing with and you just want to delete some, that's a cumbersome process also. The "fastest" way to do it is to hold down an icon until it wiggles, then tap the little (x) that gets superimposed over the icon to delete it from the phone. Fine. But next time you sync to iTunes, the application just gets copied back. Oops. Okay, so you can make a mental note to delete so & so from iTunes next time you're home, but then it's one more thing to remember. You hold your nose & use the Notes app, but then you have to go digging for the icon & flicking back to whatever screen it ended up on now, and by the time you get there, you probably forgot what it was you were supposed to be deleting. You could affix a sticky note to the phone to physically jot down a reminder, but isn't the whole point of productivity gadgets to steer you away from needing to keep track of little scraps of paper?

So that's three primary broken areas of the iPhone main screen that need attention: 

(3) removing things from the screen can be surprisingly cumbersome & unpredictable.

Aside from that, sure, it works great this way, rah rah Apple.

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A way out is already available, of course.

What I'd like to see is for the app management to work something like the iTunes or Phone apps do, allowing you to browse in different ways, set a list of favorites, search, etc. 

iPhone phone keypad screen

So, for example, the bottom row of the Phone app gives you Favorites (obviously useful), Recents (useful again), Contacts (this would be the list of everything, useful again), Keypad (maybe "Search" could go here), and Voicemail (okay probably not useful). 

iPhone iTunes genres screen

Likewise, the bottom row of the iTunes app gives me Genres (corresponding to Categories as provided by the App Store, useful), Artists (probably not useful, unless you happen to be a big fan of certain software developers or companies), Albums (again, not as useful, though I could maybe see "App Suites" -- Microsoft Office-To-Go? Adobe CS-Portable? all the silly Jirbo games? -- organized in such a way), Videos (not useful), and More (possibly useful for allowing users to decide how they want to mix & match what they have quick access to). 

Another option I wouldn't mind seeing would be a reference to the popularity info available on the App Store itself. Already I've had a couple of situations where I came across an article or blog post praising some app or another, and so went to download it, only to realize I'd already downloaded a copy but hadn't tried it yet. Maybe a way to browse the installed apps by popularity (or category, or keyword, or capability such as geolocation or motion sensing) might not be a bad idea.

The iTunes app lets me sift through dozens of video files and hundreds of songs, in lots of different ways, some derived from metadata (album, genre, artist, etc), some by my own organization choices (playlist), no problem. The Contact component of the Phone app (which is now an app by itself, too) also provides an easy way to quickly browse through dozens, hundreds or even thousands of addresses, again breaking them down in useful categorizations that are fast & easy to sift through, no problem. 

An infant could figure out how to navigate through the data in these apps.

(No, really, it's true!)

But the iPhone itself, even with just a few dozen applications, is already getting too cumbersome to deal with. It isn't going to work at all if the number of installed apps keeps growing. 

And, to be clear, providing two interfaces into the same system is rarely a good idea; that isn't what I'm proposing. Whatever gets done here has to supercede or replace Springboard. Yes, that would mean abandoning something really simple that worked fantastically well for the first year, and arguably helped make the iPhone's reputation: "look Ma, see how easy this is?" But the status quo now is already getting too confusing, and the approach offered by the Phone and iTunes -- not to mention a growing number of third party apps like Facebook and the New York Times, which appear to be following a recommended set of interface guidelines -- provides a ready alternative that is already familiar & easy to understand. I say go with something very similar to that. 

Please Apple, provide us with a smarter way to manage iPhone app libraries.

The original Springboard, while suitable for the v1 iPhone, is no longer enough to grow with in the v2 world & beyond.

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UPDATE, 21 July 10pm: This was picked up by TUAW, which of course spawned a ton of comments on that site, as well as with the photos in the Flickr set. 

To repaste my main TUAW comment here:

I really think iTunes / Contact is the way out here, not necessarily search. 

The Contact app (or the Phone interface to the same functionality) lets you define a scrollable list of favorites. You just flick up or down to find the one you need right now. It also lets you see what items were accessed recently, and the general browser lets you look either in one big flat list, or within any groups you've defined. This works well & needs little explanation for most people.

The iTunes app lets you browse in any of a handful of predefined ways (by genre, artist, album, song, etc), plus you can define playlists to impose whatever other organization you'd prefer. Again, this works well & doesn't need much explaining. 

Either of those, with only minimal tweaking, would be a massive improvement over how the current Springboard approach handles having more than a couple of screens worth of apps to manage. 

I think anything Quicksilver / Spotlight based, where you have to type what you want, would be overkill, at leI think anything Quicksilver / Spotli overhaul, sure I can see it appealing to some people. But I rarely find myself having to search for things in the iTunes app -- I just browse to what I was looking for -- and I can't picture myself using such an approach for my apps, either. 

The bigger point through is that we need something better than Springboard, which was a great iPhone v1 approach that no longer scales well with iPhone v2.

Sure, but it's a new platform, with a lot of potential. :-)

I wanted to play around with what works and what doesn't, figuring that some of them would be gems, and others would be pointless. 

I hadn't really anticipated that the iPhone UI itself would become the annoying part.