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Re: [Design] Improvement to the Screen Border Gestures and Widgets

 

Hi all,

I've been ignoring this conversation for quite some time now because I believed (and still believe) in the abilities of the design team. Given that it has, however, been going for a week now, I'd like to add my two cents.

While I see the reason why one would like a few more gestures, I do not think it is a good addition for the mass for two reasons:

1) A lot of people I have shown off my Ubuntu Phone to were already confused by the 3 (or 4) gestures which are currently there. Adding more definitely wouldn't make that better. 2) Most times I do a swipe, I don't think about it. And that's only possible because I do not have to be careful about where I start the swipe.

To come to a conclusion, I strongly vote against adding more gestures.

Cheers,
Niklas

Am Di, 30. Jun, 2015 um 3:41 schrieb ubuntuphonefb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
Hi all,

I bought the BQ Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu phone last week and the OS looks great for still being in development. The loading times, WiFi (not able to connect to my university's WiFi) and the browser could be a bit improved, but overall it's already a robust and very useful OS.

Ever since I took a few interaction design lectures during my studies in computer science I'm thinking about how interactions could be improved on modern devices/in apps. How you integrated the control gestures (swiping over the screen borders) caught my eye immediately and they are AWESOME. You should definitely extend this feature. It has the potential to render home/menu buttons on the front obsolete with ease in my opinion and thus leaving more space for the screen.

You are currently using a whole border for one fixed widget (e.g. the info center on top). I had the following idea how this could be improved: Let's divide each border into multiple parts to get more such interaction borders. A division of three parts on the long and two on the short side should work well for most device sizes. With this setup, there are ten possible places which could be used for widgets.

Ten is huge number for widgets. A few ideas which crossed my mind (* == already exist):
- system settings
- app settings (both the app's own settings and system ones like individual permissions/data/privacy/storage)
- information center (battery, network, etc.) *
- app quick-launcher *
- app/scope menu *
- switch open apps/scopes *
- back action inside the app/scope
- widgets provided by apps/scopes
- or shortcuts to start user selected apps/scopes

And there is still one slot left for a tenth widget. For a better user experience, users should be able to configure which border part provides which widget.


I see several advantages in this approach:
- The phone is customizable for left and right handed persons.
- Users can improve the accessability for their own usage profile (e.g. most used options at the bottom right).
- More widgets can be directly accessed.
- The interaction borders are still big enough to be robust against inaccurate gestures. (To support extremely small/big devices the division numbers could be user configurable too.) - With a good tutorial it would be easy enough for non-IT people to learn the placement of these actions. (i.e. during a swipe-in show a text hint for all other border actions while in tutorial mode. Leave the choice to the user whether he wants to keep them displayed afterwards.)


I would love to see this widget idea being implemented. My personal configuration would probably look kind of like
http://imgur.com/tVqJn6n

Now I'm curious to hear your thoughts and comments on this idea.


Have a nice week,
Serge


PS If this is the wrong place to post this idea/feature request, please tell me where I should post it instead.

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