Edward Tufte reviews the Windows 7 phone

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Tufte on the design of the new Windows phones.

The WP7S screens look as if they were designed for a slide presentation or for a video demo (to be read from a distance) and not for a handheld interface (read from 20 inches). For example, the headline type is too big, too spacious. One design lesson here is that most interface design work should be done at actual final scale and all internal demos should be on actual hardware rather than on pitch slides or big monitor screens. After all, users see the interface only at actual size, and so should interface designers, their managers, and so on up the management chain.

A recent unlocking of the WP7S emulator provides many many screens (perhaps all the screens in WP7S) that reinforce my concerns about low content resolution, flatness, and hierarchy. The typography is loose and over-produced, with big blimpy titles burning up content real-estate. The titling typography does not serve user needs or activities. Instead it is about its designer self, and looks like signage on the walls of a fashionable building. Good screen design for information/communication devices is all about the user and should be endlessly self-effacing. It is much more difficult to be user-friendly undesigny than designer-friendly designy.

The booming smartphone market is intensely competitive, with lots of talent, brains, money, and a vast infrastructure at hand. What is the positioning of WP7S in this market, where many users are enthusiastically committed to their new handheld devices? And how does WP7S compare with the well-established BlackBerry, iPhone, Nexus One, Android, as well as their upcoming new releases? Android is free, WP7S apparently has a license fee. Currently the two- and three-syllable platforms are way ahead of the seven-syllable platform.

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    http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003cy&topic_id=1&topic=Ask+E.T.
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