3by9

iPhone OS v3.0: Springboard Overhaul

The iPhone App Store is growing so fast that the original interaction design of the iPhone’s home screen — “Springboard” — is totally outdated. It needs an overhaul.

In case you’re not familiar with the iPhone’s iconic home screen, there are 5 rows of icons, 4 icons per row, and the bottom-most row has a special background behind it. In a previous version of the iPhone OS, you couldn’t re-arrange the icons and the four in the bottom row were stuck there permanently. Fortunately, Apple took the hint and did what Jailbroken iPhones had been doing for months — allowed you to re-arrange the icons to your liking — mainly because of the launch of the App Store and thousands of applications.

I currently have 4 screens full of apps, and I’m not really an “App junkie” either. I know people that have maxed out their screen real estate with double the screens and many times more applications than I.

There are many issues with the current configuration:

• Takes too long to scroll through pages, can’t access applications quickly.
• Every application icon has a similar shape so beyond the icon’s design, there’s no other distinguishable characteristics for identification.
• No way to organize your applications in any meaningful way.
• Only one “important area” where apps stay put, at the bottom. Apple chose this, not users.

With the App Store growing by leaps and bounds every day, there’s bound to come a point (very soon) where users are just going to accumulate too many applications and will stop downloading & buying new ones because they don’t have room. Not “storage room” within the hard drive, but physical pixel room. That’s not a good problem to have.

So what’s the solution? Here are my ideas:

• Make any application icon “sticky” so that it it stays put when you scroll to see other applications.
• Some kind of tagging or folder UI so that I can group Games with other Games and flip right to where all my Games are in one easy motion.
• Gestures would be nice. Swipe up to launch one application, swipe down to launch another.
• Drawers that can be accessible on all pages. Instead of clicking 3 times to get to the page you want, you always have access to a drawer tab that will immediately show a group of applications for quick access.

I don’t have all the ideas, and this is a very difficult problem, but I think it’s a start. I’m sure Apple engineers have been working on this for awhile so I expect to see an update at some point in the future. It’d also be nice if my background image could be shown in the Springboard background (like on my Jailbroken iPhone!) but hey, I’d settle for just a better interaction scenario.