Analysis of the user interaction design of Windows Phone 7

At the Mobile World Congress 2010 conference in Barcelona on February 15 this year, Microsoft finally officially announced the next generation of smartphone platform Windows phone 7 Series (now renamed Windows Phone 7). Over the past six months, there has been a growing awareness of Windows Phone 7 as major media have become more concerned about Windows Phone 7. At the same time, in order to be able to the vast number of developers in Windows Phone 7 before the formal listing of Windows Phone 7 on the successful development of the relevant applications, Microsoft has been in the last two months to Windows Phone 7 of the first wave of the country's developers issued thousands of Windows Phone 7 development prototype.

Metro

From the early Pocket PC to the later Windows Mobile operating system, one of the biggest criticisms of Microsoft's smartphone platform is that it is too much like a computer, not a mobile phone. This point, perhaps seven or eight years ago, could prove to be a powerful strength to say, but now it's just a sigh of shaking. It was not until the advent of Windows phone 7 that it really brightened, perhaps the smartphone operating system that users needed. Windows Phone 7 uses a set of design specifications called "Metro" to design its user interface and interactive parts. The reason why the name is called "Metro" is because it is a common subway in the passenger's instructions for the system to draw a lot of experience: concise and clear, fast, content-oriented. Microsoft, for its own account, describes Metro as "The Metro is my design language." We call it Metro because it's xiandai and clean. It ' s fast and in motion. It's about content and typography. And it ' s entirely authentic.

Figure 1–windows Phone 7 's Metro UI

Panorama
Remember how you would arrange this in Windows Mobile if your program had multiple different views to show different content? Yes, the most common practice is to create multiple forms, and the user jumps between multiple forms by manipulating controls such as buttons on a form or hyperlinks. This is actually a complete computer simulation of the behavior of the mobile phone users is actually very inconvenient. A user needs to click on a specific control to get into the desired view, and users tend to be easily lost in multiple forms without knowing how to return or go to the desired form.

Figure Numpad users are easily lost in multiple forms
One of the biggest changes Metro has brought to us is the panorama (panoramic view). It is widely used in the six hub of Windows Phone 7 (arranges, Music & Video, Pictures, Games, Marketplace, Office). Panorama view is different from any previous mobile phone system's user interface, is no longer to let your content to adapt to the narrow phone screen, and is no longer in different forms between the switch back and forth. It provides an entirely new view, extending content horizontally beyond the screen to show/integrate different controls, data, and services as if they were on a horizontal scroll. The part of the current viewable area is just the size of the phone screen, just like a sliding window on the scroll. What the user needs to do is simply slide the finger horizontally across the interface, and the scroll will then move the content you want to see into the focus area in front of you.

Figure 3-Panorama view
Pivot
For multiple content organizations, there is actually a form of desktop application. That is, through a tab, it places multiple content pages in the same window, but only one tab at a time. The user can click on the tab to toggle the content page displayed in the visual area.

Figure Numpad Tab
This organization effectively addresses the situation in multiple forms that can easily lead to a user being lost in a form, but it also has some problems. For example, there are often some menu bars underneath the form, and when you click on the tabs, you accidentally touch the menu items; when there are too many tabs, the user has to click the left and right arrows to see the other tabs. HTC has added a set of user interfaces called HTC Sense in its Windows Mobile offerings, which are essentially tabs. It's just that HTC is a good way to circumvent these flaws in the label page, such as adding labels instead of icons to prevent clicks from being inaccurate, and sliding through multiple tabs.
Accordingly, Microsoft also offers a similar solution in Windows Phone 7, Pivot (pivot) controls that are used to better organize content in this tiny screen. But it's not a completely new control, but it's already showing up in Windows Mobile 6.5.3. It just made some changes in Windows Phone 7 to make it more in line with Metro design specifications.

Figure Numpad Pivot View
We will see that the pivot control places the label content at the top with highlighted text. This makes it easy to alert the user to the current location, and not to be too close to the command button in the APP bar below to bring the risk of misoperation.
Creator Bar
Menu is an important functional navigation system, whether it is a desktop application or a browser-based Web site, or a mobile application on a mobile phone. Users can use it to execute certain commands or to jump through different content pages. In the early Windows Mobile product (Pocket PC 2002/2003) We found that it has a very strong shadow of the desktop application, in the form below the dense arrangement of small menu items. Users must carefully click on these menus to not click on the error. Also, these menu items may have submenu selections. At this point, you hold the stylus as if you had to be very precise with the mouse. This navigation is obviously not conducive to mobile phone users of the single hand operation. In the Windows Mobile 5 era, Microsoft has improved the menu system, only two menu items are allowed in the menu bar below, and if there are more menu items, they can be implemented through the submenu of these menus.

Figure 6–windows Menus in mobile systems
But this improvement is not enough to meet the actual needs of the user. Because there are only about two menu items, if the user has more than 2 menu items, there is actually a maximum of one menu item in the current interface that can be used for direct action commands (the other must be set to a submenuTo accommodate more menu items). So it causes the user to often need to expand the menu item to manipulate some commands. Microsoft has made some improvements to the menu system in Windows Phone 7. Now the menu system is called Creator Bar, which contains both command buttons and menu items. Typically, only up to four commonly used command buttons are displayed, and then the menu item is expanded when the user needs to see more commands.

Figure 7–windows Creator Bar
Summary
in phone 7 because of time and space, I can't make a detailed study of the user interface and the interactive design section in Windows phone 7. Of course, Metro brings much more than panoramic views, pivot controls, and menu system changes. It not only contains a large number of control design and use of specifications, but also the user interface and user interaction have done a very detailed interpretation and settings. If you want to start researching applications on Windows Phone 7, be sure to download the UI Design and consortium Guide for Windows Phone 7 (current version v2.0) to Microsoft's official website.

The current version of the guidebook is still based on the Beta SDK. What you need to be aware of here is that the current beta version of Windows Phone 7 's SDK does not include a panoramic view and pivot controls (though you can search for a number of Third-party implementations on the Internet) because Microsoft is still debugging and preparing the two important controls. Of course, Microsoft has confirmed that the official version of the two controls will be included in the final release of the SDK.

Source: http://www.boxui.com/?p=1496