One of the things people say when looking at the Windows Phone Start Screen is that it wastes a lot of Screen Real Estate on the right side. Here is what I am talking about:
See? The right side is occupied by just a black space with an arrow. “That space could and should be used to display useful information!”
One of the reasons for the space on the right side is that if you move the tiles up, the clock doesn’t get obscured:
But still, I hear you say… “There is so much wasted space there!” OK, I’ll play along. What if we enlarge the tiles and don’t care about the clock?
See? Compared to the original version, we actually have less information on the screen, despite starting a bit higher up. If I remove the margin entirely, things are even worse:
No whitespace, just a lot of valuable content. Right? But where did the Photo Hub’s tile go? Barely visible, just a few pixels here. And how much value did we get? We can put a few more characters in the tiles without changing the font size, but nothing to call home about.
OK, but if we do utilize the entire screen, we may be able to put three columns of tiles there, right?
Maybe… these tiles are 152 pixels wide, maybe 10% drop from the current 173. But the fonts on the tiles are getting too small to read easily if you are beyond your twenties… What do you think? Does being able to see the extra 5-6 tile worth it? I personally prefer the current, two column layout, three columns just feel crowded. Maybe if I had a bigger phone and bigger resolution, additional columns would make sense…
Posted
Mar 23 2012, 04:17 PM
by
vbandi