It’s 10 minutes that will change your life.

One area where Windows Phone differentiates itself from the competition is this idea of a “Live Tile.”  When thinking about your application, it’s easy to forget about this – you can’t, however.  The Live Tile is the start of your conversation with your users.

In most cases, application enter into an opening Panorama.  The Panorama is maybe the most quintessential Windows Phone experience.  An example:

Or

The Panorama is a visual display of what your application does – in addition to this, it provides enough glancable information for your users to understand what part of your application they might want to explore further.  The Panorama is your first, best chance to make a good impression – make sure you fully take advantage of it – use the background, express your brand!

When Windows Phone 7 was first announced, and in my conversations with customers, there’s been some confusion about the difference between the Panorama and the Pivot.

Pivots are about drilling down to a specific decision, or looking at a facet of your data in more detail.  While the left / right swipe may be similar between the Panorama and the Pivot, they’re at opposite ends of a user’s experience!

Part of drilling down on a facet of information is taking action.  Often, you’ll see an Application Bar.  This is the one predictable spot where your users will go to perform actions.  The App bar can hold a maximum of 4 icons, and another 5 items in the menu below it.  It may feel weird to not have a big button floating on the screen, but trust me, love the App Bar.

The above is a very high-level overview of the key aspects of the Windows Phone 7 UX.  As your building your app, remember the following key points:

• Metro helps you and your users solve problems consistently
• Embrace motion as a way to convey importance and emotion
• Have a single left margin for all your elements on screen
• Experiment!

As long as I’m ending my long spell of not blogging, I wanted to also make sure everyone knew about the recently launched eBay Simple Lister application, powered by Silverlight 4 and built by our fantastic partner, Cynergy.  Check out the video overview here:

This video was taken at MIX10 this year.  Cynergy and the eBay Simple Lister were also featured at Sliverlight 4’s launch as well as Expression Studio 4’s launch at InternetWeek in NYC two weeks ago.

I was deeply involved in the project, co-leading it with my great colleague, Raj Ramabadran.  Working with Cynergy is consistently a great experience, and building an application like eBay Simple Lister was a lot of fun!  eBay Simple Lister is being rolled out to about 1/6th of eBay’s Casual sellers right now.  If you want to be sure to get it, check out http://pages.ebay.com/garden/srp/SimpleListerInstall.html

Personal Note:  I’ve had the pleasure to lead the Microsoft contribution of this project for the last 3 months or so (it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long!) – It’s so great to see one of our partners launch such a fantastic experience like this.  I wish I was in France to see it!  More videos to come at touchwall.cloudapp.net.

One of the things that can be difficult as a Microsoft Evangelist is knowing about really cool stuff and not being able to talk about it.  Looking Glass is one of those things.  Ad Age had a great write up of it here: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=139199

Looking Glass is built on top of SharePoint, taking advantage of it’s advanced workflow, tracking and routing capabilities.  In addition, it also uses SQL Server for reporting.  On top of all that, the UX is built in Silverlight and extensible – you can develop your own visualization as needed.  Check it out!

Updated: Check out the more in-depth article at Microsoft Advertising

столове

After all the work that went into this, it’s great to see Photobucket Visual Search Win.  Check out the award site here.

Photobucket Visual Search is here.

There will be food, drinks and give aways. Check out www.ixdasf.org for more information. Looking forward to seeing you there!

One of the reasons why I love being an evangelist is figuring out how we get great projects done on our platform – this one has me particularly excited.  I’ve been leading the project for the last 6 or so months, coordinating between our great clients at Photobucket and our fantastic design partner, EffectiveUI.  Photobucket, the world’s largest photo website, is launching Photobucket Visual Search today, powered by Silverlight and Windows Live.

http://photobucket.com/visualsearch

From the very beginning, Photobucket recognized that images are almost always social – it’s why they became the defacto standard for image hosting on MySpace and other social networking sites. Photobucket is always looking for ways to make the social experience more rewarding – in this case, they turned to Microsoft for help.

So what does Photobucket Visual Search do?

At its most basic level, Photobucket Visual Search lets you search Photobucket, well, visually. Just type in the search term, and see the results flow over the page. But what if I want to see related images? Here, Visual Search starts to show its value. With a simple click of the related items pulldown, you see terms that are related to the current set of images.  A click lets you see a larger version of the image, but still allows you to move through the collection of images easily. What if I want to share these images I’ve found? This is where Photobucket Visual Search really shines. Because Photobucket decided to integrate Windows Live Messenger into the application, sharing an image with any of Windows Live Messenger’s 320+ million active users is as easy as one click.

Wrapping it all up

It’s really exciting for me to see so much effort finally launching – we’re really looking forward to the response of the community.  More than that, it’s also really exciting to see another major web presence adopt Silverlight and Windows Live Services.

If you’re thinking about a new RIA and want to discuss Silverlight, let me know by contacting me at william dot tschumy at microsoft dot com.  Finally, if you’re thinking about doing something social on any platform, be sure to check out dev.live.com – if you even think you might want to make your site social, live gives you lots of different options with almost no extra work.

Check out http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/Jun09/06-16Photobucket.mspx for more!

UPDATE:  Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/angus_logan/archive/2009/06/19/photobucket-adds-sizzle-and-sharing-via-instant-messaging-to-photo-search.aspx Too!

Amazing what can be done in a week.  Nicely done, Archetype!

After all was said and done, Archetype won both the judge’s accolades and the people’s choice at the Phizzpop Design Challenge LA last Friday the 20th.

Archetype’s “Resonate” solution combined a desktop application that allows artist management to merchandize singles, albums etc.  For Artists, it shows them current sales, and upcoming events.  It also allows them schedule upcoming events.  Finally, for fans, an immersive concert experience allows them to share the experience, even if they’re not at the concert.  Maybe most impressive was, despite only having a week to work, the working mobile video upload and transcoding.  Archetype shot cell phone video, uploaded it live, only to have it show up in their solution!

About the Judges

Archetype was judged the best by:

Jim Mainard – Head of Production, Dreamworks

DJ Pooh – Frequent collaborator with Ice Cube.  Writer, Rapper, Director and Producer

Jason Turner – SVP of Web Properties, Rhino Records

Rick Barazza – Sr UX Architect, Cynergy Systems (and member of the Winning Phizzpop Team from last year)