Samsung Design Jam
Redesigning the Home & Lock Screen Experience.
Sponsored by Samsung
Overview 📱
This project, made in partnership with Samsung, tasked us to challenge the current state of mobile device home, app, and lock screens and come up with concepts that show our vision on how our native digital citizens will interact with their mobile devices differently.
Team 🤝
3 Person Team
Role 👨💻
UX/UI Designer
Tools 💻
Adobe XD, Photoshop, POP
Duration 📅
3 Weeks
Initial Question 💭
What do people want from their mobile device home and lock screens? This question allowed our team to conduct research into how users currently interact with their mobile devices.
Research 📋
Our team conducted a survey to better understand how users use their home and lock screens, their usage patterns, and the kinds of features they want. 113 participants, between the ages of 16 and 69, across 8 different nationalities, provided us with some key insights that framed our direction. These insights led us to create 3 design principles.
Design Principles 💡
Convenience: design an experience that included effective elements that help users.
Speed: often the cause of frustration with interfaces as we head towards an instant access design.
Efficiency: design an experience that reduced our user’s decision-making time and got straight to the point.
App Widget Redesign 🖌️
Our design moves away from app icons to widgets with multiple tap targets and focused notifications. Often times with simply app icons there is no information, context or further details as to the notifications. We transformed these icons into interactive widgets that bring app shortcuts, information, and speed to the forefront. Examples for Instagram, Snapchat, Gmail, and Spotify are shown below.
First Home Screen 📱
The first/main home screen showcases our Enhanced App Widgets. These widgets take users to the exact function they need at that time. These enhanced widgets can be placed on top of one another, all on this Scrolling Home Screen. Additionally, an Expandable App Dock can be used to store frequently used apps. A prototype video can be seen below.
First Home Screen
○ Enhanced App Widgets
○ Expandable App Dock
○ Scrolling Home Screen
Second Home Screen 📱
The second home screen has a few shortcuts to some daily used features. Placing a Recommended Apps Widget shows a list of suggested apps. Also, the Recently Used Apps Widget makes it easy to instantly access apps users have been using.
Second Home Screen
○ Recommended Apps Widget
○ Recently Used Apps Widget
○ Tools & Utilities On Top
Wireframes & Initial Designs ✏️
The initial stages of our design process consisted of sketching out low fidelity wireframes in order to get our ideas out onto the screen.
Initial design sketches that led to our wireframes.
Early wireframes of our home, lock, and notification screen designs made in Adobe XD.
Prototype 📲
To conclude our presentation, we created a short prototype video of our screen designs to demonstrate our vision in practice.
Project Takeaways 🌟
There still remains a lot of potential for home and lock screen designs and enhancements to increase productivity and the overall user experience. As a small team we were able to create a prototype of our current vision for mobile device home and lock screens. Special thanks to Raymond Liang of Samsung for this project opportunity! I’d be happy to discuss this project in further detail. Thanks for checking it out!