Yesterday we got hands on with a Windows Phone 7 prototype. The thing that the Windows Phone 7 seem to be most pleased with about with this phone is the design. But on getting a little hands on, we were baffled. The design looks great, really great, and the news that hubs can be created by developers restores confidence. However, there’s some crucial flaws with the Windows Phone 7 design, one of which struck me more than anything else.
The Windows Phone 7 design is bold, with beautiful clean sans serif fonts, made even sharper with scalable vector graphics, meaning that pinch and zoom never pixelates fonts. However, going for this bold, clean, minimal design has sacrificed a level of practicality that, on a day to day basis, is set to cause frustration for its users.
The screen we played with was about the same size, if not slightly bigger, than an iPhone screen. The Windows Phone 7 home page is good, with the cool blue tiles that display live data. But move beyond the home screen and there’s some great looking, but impractical interfaces, and it’s all down to those bold fonts.
So, for example, the Windows Phone 7 people hub, which pulls together all social networking and contact details into on searchable database, has its large hub title at the top of the screen. The text is two, maybe three cm tall, with the space underneath, and takes up around one quarter of the screen. It acts as a sort of scrolling indicator, so the amount the text (for the people hub it says ‘people’ at the top) moves as you scroll indicates the amount of content or number of pages there is to the right.
This movement is a nifty way of indicating content, but the space it takes up is ridiculous. Users do not need to see this title so big, and it means that the data Windows Phone 7 users do want to see is forced to be smaller to account for the minimal design.
The actual information, the names of contacts and authors of status updates being displayed are in roughly a font size 14, quite big, and easy to see. But the actual content of the status updates are tiny – maybe font size eight equivalent or smaller, and in a paler colour. This means that the actual information, the status updates that users want to read, is the smallest, tiniest portion of text on the page, with all the space given over to the great impractical scroller text at the top. The same is true of other Windows Phone 7 hubs, although is most prominent in the people and outlook hub, and there’s no option to change the size of this text.
With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft are going hard at a few key features, on of them being the look of the phones. But in the midst of scalable vector graphics and sexy sans serifs, it’s forgetting how important easy reading is on a small screen.
