Intro

Hey Community!

Given we love the monochrome theme here at Nothing, we lost color as an important parameter to distinguish between apps in our app grids, and it’s a problem to be addressed.

The Smart Drawer is essentially an attempt to tackle this. It’s a great thought to address this issue leveraging AI, but honestly the first step was bad (at least in the open beta). I personally switched back to default very quickly.

And I think I have better methods to solve this, and hence this concept. This project is text-intensive. Kindly take time to read through the images at least, especially if you are a member of the team at Nothing.

The Work

Breakdown

There are four key aspects to my redesign, addressing separate issues for different types of users.

Favourites: User’s choices are much more superior to AI’s predictions no matter how good the model is. The favourites panel essentially does this, providing a choice to pin up to two categories and up to 6 apps to the top of the grid

Suggestions (AI-Powered): This is a slot to place 8 apps that that model predicts the user would open. But the real power lies in the refresh button which puts forward 8 more apps. It is very highly probable that the user would have found the app by this step.

Search (voice + text): These are two easily accessible buttons that address the cases when the user tried to find an app that is rarely used.

Category reordering: The categories will be displayed on a per-session basis, based on what the user is doing in a given session. I don’t have an image, but you get the idea : ]

A Request

This took a massive amount of time for what it looks like. Part of it is on me, sure, but it would be of great help if we get to know more about the design systems followed by the teams at Nothing. A significant amount of time went into figuring out the grids :' ]

Bye

This is just the first iteration. I have a few more thoughts in line of “edit mode”, “folder layouts”, etc. I am a person that always works alone in the late nights. I would like to collaborate with others to get out of this loop.

Bye : )
Uday