Courtesy of Engadget at Mix 11..

http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/13/this-is-windows-phone-next-developers-take-notes-video/

Some ideas for Windows Phone Next UI

Here’s some ideas and feedback for the Windows Phone team which might improve the “Metro” interface experience significantly..

The “Application List”

Search great idea…  but this for apps ?  No way!  Works great in the context of finding a “contact” but an app NO WAY.. Who thought this up was anyone really thinking good design ?

How about letting us be able to sort our list both alphabetically and by “Most Used” ?? In fact I’d like to be able to set my most used applications to be able to show up on that list first.. Why not just use a tile? on the start screen ?. There are apps I don’t need on a TILE and don’t need to use notification features of that tile space (which is prime real estate).

MSFT UI Designers… “hello… is anyone home ?”

Did any designers over at Windows Phone ever think we might want to scroll this list from z-a and a-z, or by “most used” or “last used”.. Come on folks this is standard fair even in windows 7.. It’s just dumb that you can’t do this in a “Metro” UI..

Really guys, put designers in charge of this not developers. A “metro” style toggle of views wouldn’t be difficult for this list plus views with more metadata about the app like we can see here in windows 7. I am just suggesting different meta data than what’s in Windows 7 in that view..

Other Ideas for the Application List change I am proposing..

Let’s be able to look at installed “Apps” in the same kind of detail view that we do in the Marketplace.. Since you are adding search anyway, why not put that at the top and build out the detail on the installed application icon list.. I personally would like to know more about the app if I chose that view of it (like when I installed it, last used) how much storage the app itself is using.  I have a tendency to watch things like this on the Silverlight plug-in.

Why would this be useful ? Well think about using Silverlight on the web..

I can see how much resources the apps are using. So I can get a better idea if I have room for another ten more applications or if I can download/buy that new song I want. Devices have limited amounts of space and a view of that would be cool. Also being able to assign this a quota would be a good thing.. I think it would be great to have a view of this kind of thing on the applications list not in a settings panel somewhere..

Marketplace has expanded detail views why not the “App” list that we have already installed.. Let’s put some metadata about storage usage and how about how to contact the app vendor for support.. How about being able to let the user clear an application’s private storage cache if we want to because it’s cosuming too many resources (giving us the option of reloading when we want. I have ran out of storage on windows phone by it downloading too many media purchases on Zune Marketplace..