The First Thing I Did After I Graduated UX Design
As I mentioned in my last article, I recently “shifted” some of my focus from more traditional Copywriting to UX Design, undertaking studies at General Assembly. Results have been mixed so far…and I designed an app which I hope to post about soon, while learning a lot of fundamental concepts about design in general which will help me a lot in my path from ad writing to UX writing and design.
But first up-with my new user-centered design brain fully engaged, I decided to go to the one thing near and dear to my heart:
That’s right, my phone.
To be fair, my phone layout was a mess. But that’s mostly by design.
I read one of those Medium articles about breaking your phone addiction, and it basically summarized it by saying “make apps really hard to find so it makes it harder to use”.
And before you roll your eyes too hard, yes, I realize how many red notifications I have and it must be driving you crazy. Unfortunately, I’m one of “those people”. But if it makes your OCD cringe too hard, than just scroll to the end where you’ll be happy to know that I’ve turned them off.
But this is what it used to looked like:
I know, so Marie Kondo-ish, yet not at all useful at all right?
Also, this isn’t an article on phone addiction/productivity, but more of a“Nah, I love my phone like my dog loves peanut butter and I’m not afraid to say it” type of post.
So I started by sorting my apps into 6 main buckets:
Only for inspiration-Apps I would rarely use, downloaded just for inspiration or comparison purposes.
Need Quickly- Apps needed when you’re in a rush. Example might be your camera, or when you need that Wallet app to access your boarding pass.
Then I checked my screen usage tool, a thing I definitely was aware of before I wrote this article, to see my usage data:
(I’m embarrassed to share how often I use Twitter/social media in general. I blame our current political climate)
So now that I’ve sorted my apps into buckets, my next task was to consider hierarchy and classifications.
Obviously, “Stuff I need” isn’t super helpful, so I needed to be more clear about the apps purpose. Or, more specifically, how I use it.
I’ve seen how other people do it and most do the standard “Productivity”, “Music”, “Social Media” type of nomenclature, usually based on whatever generic title Apple gives to you when you place apps into a folder.
But that didn’t really resonate with me.
I think a better way to sort app categories is by purpose of use. For instance, “Music” isn’t really helpful to me, because I have standard apps for playing music like Spotify, but I have some music apps like Tabs-which helps me memorize and read Ukulele/Guitar chords. Or Soundhound/Shazam, which help me recognize a song playing over the radio.
And I use those 3 apps very differently.
So I decided it makes more sense to categorize them by what I want to do in the context of my situation. And so I chose to instead create categories based on my purpose…like Listening.
These are the apps I have in my Listening folder. Notice that Spotify is there, but so are Podcasts and Audible. The commonality being that I would choose these apps on car rides to and from work. Sometimes I’ll listen to an audio book, sometimes I’ll listen to a podcast, or sometimes I’ll play some jams on Spotify. So to me it makes more sense.
And so I did the same with Reading, Watching, Eating, etc.
Why are Medium and Instagram together? I access both of these when I’m on a bus and want to consume some content. The fact that one is for consuming helpful articles and one is for playful social interactions doesn’t really matter as far as my purpose for them goes.
So, with my new categories and folders in mind, I came up with this:
But, it still felt too busy (I hate you red alerts). Some of these I either don’t access every day, or don’t need them quickly, so I started to file some of them away onto the second page.
Watching: Yeah I access YouTube and YouTube TV a lot, but probably not every day (at least on my phone), and I never need it right away. So yeah, that probably should go on page 2.
Settings: page 2. I need it and use it a lot, but not all the time.
Eating: My girlfriend and I eat out a LOT. So yes, this is page 1 material.
Google Maps: On my final take, I decided I use Google Maps so damn much I’m putting it on my menu bar (sorry iTunes).
Notifications: A long time coming, but I decided to turn off notifications altogether. Nothing is so important that I’d need an annoying red dot to remind me that it’s there.
My final iteration looks like this:
Feel free to discuss, agree or disagree (of course, phones are all about its owner, so anything you say is pretty subjective) but I’ve found this works well for me. But if you’ve found anything particularly useful for you-such as maybe color settings, brightness, organization, etc., I’d love to hear it.
