In 2011, our team was commissioned to start with a blank canvas and reimagine a tablet interface that was truly differentiated from Apple, Microsoft and Google. My role was the Creative/Strategy Director guiding three designers to create three disparate approaches. I seeded each with high level UX sketches and challenged each to incorporate speculative functionality that was missing from tablets in the market place.
We were also asked to ideate on unlock mechanisms that were original and potentially be accomplished one handed. The Vulcan claw twist played off of the design of bowling ball holes and required a three digit clock-wise twist to unlock.
We introduced multi-user sign-on and partitioning.
The portal interface was designed to be very thumb friendly and promoted app icons by usage... much a like a tag cloud hierarchy.
Simply pulling in from the edges revealed drawers of icons or settings. Apps could be dragged/dropped for priority placement.
Notifications and alerts were purposely divided into two sections to help prioritize system updates and device reminders from social updates and messaging.
Simply pulling the icons out of the portal deleted them from the favorites though stayed in the library.
We explored consuming content primarily in the oculus, while suggesting lateral navigation to browse other apps.
Customizing widgets for data was a drag/drop effort, too.
Behind the Scenes:
Here are my original sketches exploring various organic navigation patterns while brainstorming with the design team.
