iOS Presets

A concept tool to enable people to create a home screen that feels like home.

PROBLEM

Often times, it takes a great amount of time and mental cost to create a home screen that reflects our needs and purposes

SOLUTION

Create an Apple iOS tool that introduces delightful moments in constructing a home screen.

MY ROLE

Sole Designer

PLATFORM

iOS

TIMELINE

1 month

TOOLS

Figma, After Effects

PROBLEM SPACE

Has editing your home screen ever looked like this?

After going through the time-consuming and often frustrating task of manually dragging and dropping apps into the midst of digital clutter, we often end up with a home screen that “just works”.

Why spend up to hours editing and settle for something that “just works”?

OVERVIEW

Paving a new way

Constructing your home screen shouldn’t be a monotonous task—but a series of delightful experiences. This is where it all starts.

Take control

Have full autonomy over your home screen. Choose how you want to create your home; filter out what you don’t need.

Creating excitement

After selecting your apps, watch in anticipation as the cards turn over to reveal your new home.

Being versatile

Our needs are constantly changing, even within the day, our home screens should reflect those changes.

Ok, let’s talk shop

I’m going to be talking about my process from here on out. You might want to stick around—there’s some cool things that went on here.

USER RESEARCH

Insight 1: Everyone has a different idea of what their home screen should look like

From my interviews and surveys, it was clear that everyone has a different idea of what an "ideal" home screen looks like. Some people thrive in the disorganized clutter, while others can’t bare to look at a home screen that isn’t sorted to their preferences.

Insight 2: People don’t always have the motivation to organize their home screens

It seems that organizing your home screen falls victim to the Fogg Behavior Model. Where for a lot of people, the mental cost is too high and they don’t have enough motivation to complete the action. My goal here would be to reduce this mental cost required to organize your home screen, so that regardless of motivation, the action is simple enough to be completed.

Insight 3: People don’t use all the apps they have installed

We don’t use all the apps that we install. This is not to say that the apps we don’t use are useless, but rather it’s not always imperative that these apps are on our home screen.

Image by Hardik Shah via:

www.simform.com/the-state-of-mobile-app-usage/#numberofappinstalls

So, who are we designing for?

From the surveys and interviews that I conducted, I created personas that represented a spectrum of different user goals and pain points.

Raina

Raina is very organized and particular about her home screen. She has spent hours on her home screen to make sure it’s tailored to her exact preferences.

Jay

Jay doesn’t care much for the organization of his phone’s home screen. His home screen is messy, but it’s functional to him. It’s not optimal, but he settles with it because he has no incentive to make changes.

GOALS

Aiming for the “IKEA effect”

The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias in which people tend to place higher value to products they have partially contributed to. The key to achieving the IKEA effect is: high value, high contribution, but low effort. The goal is to apply this principle to Presets. We want people to create and value their home screens with minimal effort.

By Anton Nikolov via

https://uxdesign.cc/design-principle-ikea-effect-2d908b2de81

This all being said, the goals for my design is to create a tool that:

Reduces mental load

Decreases mental cost and time required to edit a home screen.

Allows user to customize

Giving users the ability to customize and tailor their home page to serve their diverse needs.

Cleans up clutter

Reduces the digital clutter of apps, widgets, and shortcuts.

IDEATION

Sketching it out

Before jumping into frames, I very roughly sketched out what the primary flow would look like. After a few sketches, I landed on a flow that I would end up pursuing.

WIREFRAMES

Putting thoughts into frames

After sketching out potential solutions, I hopped into Figma and started wireframing these ideas. I like to get started with mid-fidelity wireframes just so that my ideas are more easily understood by others and myself. It’s ultimately easier for me to visualize the solution and how it would evolve this way.

DESIGN SYSTEMS

Following guidelines

To be clear, I did not have access to Apple’s in-house design system or source of truth for this project. However, I used Apple resources like SF Symbols and Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. Here are some of my favorite pages from those guidelines.

ITERATIONS

Failing until you don’t

I once heard that design is making mistakes long enough that one of them ends up being the one you wanted.

Shown here, are a few of my iterations when it came to selecting a home screen layout. One of the takeaways I learned from doing this is that the screens should be large enough to view easily, showing one screen at a time allows people to process the information more easily.

More iterations

In these iterations shown, I struggled with where this product idea should exist. I knew that Presets should be a part of how we traditionally edit our home screens. The main takeaway here was that I have to keep in mind how people already use existing tools and to not disrupt that flow, but enhance it.

And a whole lot more...

FINAL DESIGNS

Building a new home

In order to avoid confusion and allow for a more seamless experience, a brief overview and instructions are provided before starting the flow.

Choosing your toolset

A list of your most frequented apps is pulled up. From here, you can decide to continue with this list or edit it to your own preferences.

Discovering your new home

After choosing apps, you are given 5 different home screen options. These home screens can vary by widget usage, widget sizes, amount of pages, page usage, etc.

Switching between homes

You can save your Presets by naming them. Upon completion, the Presets tab will no longer present the onboarding screen, but rather a Preset gallery, where all your saved Presets will exist. From there, you can switch between the different Presets that you’ve saved.

Error states

There’s always going to be errors. It’s important to map out what those moments will look like. Designing error states is also taking ownership of the product experience.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaways & Reflections

This project was actually a huge challenge for me. It started out as a fun idea that quickly turned into a project that would go in many different directions. That being said, I’ll share my takeaways and reflections here.

My biggest takeaway from this project was that everyone uses products differently. Moreover, people think about those products differently as well. In my case, everyone has different needs and purposes for their home screens. I spent a lot of time thinking about how everyone’s needs could fit into my project idea instead of vice versa. Another big takeaway was to simplify. There were so many ideas and features that I explored, but at the end of the day, focusing on the user needs and goals is the whole point of design.

Some things I would do differently or do again is the information architecture of the app selection. Although I explored countless methods, I felt and still feel that there’s room for improvement. Perhaps it’s lack of insight? more data needed? The trade-off here was that there’s a high level of customization, but comprehensive app list could be overwhelming to look at. Regardless, I learned a lot while working on this project and look forward to continue learning as a I grow in my design career.