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.

  1. 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

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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

--

    Related discussions

    Good work brother! Keep doing this types of stuff. Liked it. I will be covering this.

    “Thank you for your excellent work! If I were the HR of this company, I would definitely hire you. We’ll do our best to showcase these impressive graphics to CarlPei.”

      Really nice work. Really like the easily accessible buttons, and also the AI drive suggestions. I haven’t tried/seen smart drawer in action but, hopefully the team can take some inspiration from this.

      Loving this redesign…only if nothing decides to to make changes something like this🥲

      So I’m clear…

      Q. Does the Smart Drawer replace the App Drawer (swipe up from Home screen)?

      If so, this looks terrible – I can’t get my head round why this mess is necessary:

      1. Favourites. Surely our favourite (or commonly used) apps are what we have along the bottom of the Home screen (Phone, Browser, Camera, etc), or place ourselves elsewhere on the home screen, perhaps in widget form?
      2. Suggestions. For what reason do we need this? I thought society/Nothing want to make phones less addictive – making suggestions for other apps seems to encourage longer screen time. If there are users who need to group apps together, don’t they simply use a folder on the Home screen (or drawer)? And does any RL benefit actually outweigh the cost of allowing AI to build profiles of each user’s usage & habits, which could be sold/shared with third parties and used against users.
      3. Search. I have A-Z down the side of my app drawer, so I can jump to whichever app I’m looking for without typing. For people who still wish to type out an app’s name or don’t know how to spell and need to tap the voice command button, this process needs to be ‘burdenless’. No point having the bar at the top of the screen. First thought is to have one swipe up for search and frequently used/favourite apps. Second swipe for full drawer. Reflects the notification drawer.

      I would like the search to be end-to-end across the entire phone (like in Pixel), and not just search for applications

        A. You get to choose between the two.

        1. True. In my case, I have basic apps like the browser, camera, phone, etc. and apps that I open frequently on my home screen. But this does not address it all the time. I find myself swiping up ~30% of the time say. Some might have it for 40%, it depends. This is where the drawer comes in.
        2. This is a little deeper than I can answer 🫡
        3. A nice upside of the A-Z, is it is static (partly). Because you get the muscle memory. But I find myself installing/uninstalling apps at least once per 5-7 days on average. So it’s not so much static anyways. Having favourites of your choice should help with the muscle memory. Suggestions panel shows you apps in the 4×2 area, based on your usage, so it is quite probable that the app that you are looking for is right in front of your eyes. You have to hide the keyboard to swipe for the second time, so there’s that.

          Uday

          1. If there are apps you need an estimated 30% of the time which are not on your Home screen, would you not consider putting shortcuts in a folder on pg.1 or 2 of your Home screen?

          1. With my suggestion, the keyboard only opens if the user taps on the search bar, which would be when the app they are looking for is not on their Home screen, or in the ‘Favourites’ module, and the user does not wish to swipe up again for the full list of apps with A-Z skip.

            Muscle memory should have little affect on the A-Z list. If the user is searching for WhatsApp, pressing ‘W’ brings the app icon to the same position every time, regardless of whether there are more or less apps in the drawer.

            Alright, let’s address this.

            1. Let me show you my home screen. There are two (screens?) in mine. First one has a bunch of primitive widgets, quick settings tiles, two folders (that cover my 60-70%). Second one has my calendar, and other handy widgets (those that although used less per day, used consistently daily) which make sense to be put there.

            Now I gathered and added the 30% that we’re talking about. These are the ones.

            The problem here is, 18 apps are my 70% usage that I managed to accommodate in those two folders, and I gathered a great muscle memory over those already. But 30% usage is still significant. Adding my 30% adds 27 more apps. This is a big number for 30% given it was only 18 for my 70%. I don’t want to mess up my muscle memory to accommodate these in my home screen, which by the way would turn into three screens if I add the 30%. Here’s a lazy job that I did accommodating these and sorting them out into folders.

            I miss the second set of widgets that were quite handy. And no matter how good of a job I do accommodating these, they’ll surely fade out my otherwise solid muscle memory, and it’ll also turn it into three screens, which is outside the sweet spot.

            3. The suggestions panel, if the model is good enough, should cover you most of the time. Imagine typing to search every time you have to search for your 30%. Now imagine suggestions panel showing it for the most part, and you cover the anomalies with the accessible search buttons. I think the latter is better.

            Congrats @Uday on getting this concept out. Seems like a lot of work and research has gone into this.

            I personally have rarely used the app drawer once I setup the phone, everything sits on my homescreen. I also believe that the Smart Drawer (Nothing’s upcoming one and yours as well) is more intended for people who have installed a ton of apps and want more organization. I am very minimalistic in that regard, I think I have installed maybe 6 apps aside from the stock ones. So I probably would never use any smart drawer in that case, but this could solve a problem for people who have a ton of apps on their phone.