Microsoft has had quite the month with their Windows Phone 7 event. The first handsets have been released in Europe and are set to come out next month in the US. I wanted to touch on the design (or lack thereof) in Microsoft’s new consumer-savvy OS.

It looks good. I’ll admit that. When I first saw it back in February, I thought it looked fantastic. They implemented a UI paradigm I had often dreamed about. The idea that the small screen of a phone was merely a window into a much larger interface than could physically be shown. Most smartphone OSes currently display applications in the same modal style. One screen at a time, and each action takes you to an entirely new screen. It’s fixed in its operation. Now imagine looking at a large map through a magnifying glass. All the information is laid out, but it’s hard to discern without use of the magnifying glass. This is what Windows Phone 7 is like. While the screen is still focused on the same sets of data that modal views are, there are previews of adjacent screens on the fringes of the display. The advantage of this is seeing a context of where data is. There is less confusion for the user to find data that is not immediately present or obvious. This relates to the map metaphor in the sense that while you may not be able to see the details of an adjacent city on the map without the magnifying glass, you can still see where it is relative to where you are. Instead of having to look up the city’s location in the map index, you can just move your magnifying glass over to it. It gives the user a clear idea of what the app contains and what it is capable of. All they have to do is scroll over to the section they want. Even in Microsoft’s press shots of Windows Phone 7 apps, they show the application as an expanded canvas, with the phone over one section. The problem I see most people suffering from is not sure what an app can actually do. They aren’t sure how to access certain functions of an app, or aware that those functions are there in the first place. Apple has done a fairly good job at avoiding this by finding a way to put most functions on screen and hiding very little. Android is a huge offender of this problem. It seems that when there isn’t space on screen for an extra button, that function gets shoved in the Menu button’s contextual menu, which varies wildly from app to app. Microsoft seems to have gotten this key staple in user experience right from the beginning.

How about the look of the UI? I mentioned that I originally loved it. But after seeing screenshots of it over the past few months, I’ve grown tired. It still looks good, but it looks cheap. A nice, white, sans-serif typeface against a dark background always looks good. That’s easy. And that really is all there is to the UI of Windows Phone 7. The first problem I have with this UI is one that breaks a cardinal rule of interface design. With human interfaces, especially touch interfaces, buttons should be marked in a very clear way. In Windows Phone 7, every app is just a list of text. There are no markers of any sort around buttons. How is a user to know which items are actionable and which are fixed? Sure, they can experiment and learn over time, but the test of a good UI is one that is easy to pick up and use right away. The user should be able to trust the UI to not behave in an erratic manner, and to complete the tasks set by the user.

The second problem is that everything looks the same. This really isn’t a new GUI more than it is a stylized overhaul to the text based UI of DOS. This can hinder developers by making the differentiation of apps difficult. Apple did a fantastic job of creating a standard, unified UI with iOS, but gave developers a lot of room to create custom UIs of their own that still fit with the platform as a whole. It seems the only customizations app developers can make is to change the background color of their apps. Just look at the Office app. Same as all the others but with an orange background. Same with the Netflix app, but with a red background. This will get old very quickly.

I do not state the above as fact, these are only my opinions and impressions of what I have seen so far of Windows Phone 7. Only time will tell if the problems I have pointed out are actually problems at all. I do think on the whole it is a great update from the steaming pile that was Windows Mobile, and it is refreshing to see a new competitor in the mobile space.