Saturday, July 26, 2014

About Windows Phone 8.1 usability

This is interesting. While it's obvious that WP UI was designed with attention to details, some of the user experience is not pleasant at all. For example:

1. When you start using your phone, you can't update or install any app, unless you set the correct date. Technically, it fails when you try to create Outlook account (or "live id", whatever), which will be bound to the phone. Problem is that error message is extremely cryptic, stating only that update/install failed and providing error number. Googling up the error number revealed no specific details (at least to me). So I had to google once more, why the phone update could fail which gave me the page with possible problems, mentioning the need for correct time. My guess is that it reaches out to MS server to "activate" the phone. Anyway, it was quite unpleasant.

 2. Windows store app. I think it's not obvious that app updates are in downloads section. It took some time for me to figure it out.

3. Setting time by scrolling the rectangles with numbers is a bad idea IMO :) It may seem good to designers, but I'd prefer to type the numbers.

4. No changelogs in most of app updates. I mean those pre-installed apps like "News", "Weather" and Nokia stuff.

But all in all I can't say that I'm too disappointed. It runs rather smooth, and rectangle UI, while new to me, is an interesting concept.

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