Microsoft working to make Windows Live Tiles more interactive and useful
Microsoft is working to make its signature Live Tiles much more interactive and capable. Today, the tiles mainly exist to provide glanceable information for popular apps across Windows 8 and Windows Phone. They’ll tell you how many email messages are waiting for you, or display a comment someone’s posted to your Facebook wall. But the company clearly has bigger plans for the future, according to a video from Microsoft Research.
In the clip, we see a new “interactive tile view” concept that makes it much easier to respond to specific notifications. For example, rather than just tapping on the Outlook tile to pull up the app, you can scroll through your inbox and tap on a specific email to view that message — all from the Live Tile. The footage also showcases a revised Desktop Live Tile that gathers every app a user has running in the traditional Windows mode. Here again, you can tap on any program that’s listed to quickly open it.
A new video clip from Microsoft Research’s TechFest 2014 event in February features Jiawei Gu, the company’s Human-Computer Interaction Group researcher, demonstrating the ‘Interactive Live Tiles research project.’ The video clip was taken down shortly after being uploaded.
In the video clip, Gu could be seen demonstrating how users could interact with the Live Tiles that are core to the Windows 8.X, Windows Phone and Xbox user interfaces in new ways.Gu shows a new interactive desktop tile that lets users open desktop apps from the Windows 8 Start screen without opening the full desktop. The interactive Live Tiles can run alongside other apps.
GU also shows a new Live Tile functionality that lets users browse through a list of emails without opening the app. “In Windows 8 Modern UI, the live tiles right on your start screen get you closer to the things that matter most,” Gu says in the video.
“In this project we designed interactive tiles which enable users to manipulate Live Tiles in an interactive way with touch gestures, with aims to provide a seamless experience in the start screen across all Microsoft devices.” The project on the official Microsoft Research site was described as “an Interactive-Tile UI system that enables users to access and manipulate Live Tiles in an interactive way with touch gestures. Interactive Tile’s UI is responsive and flexible to an app’s content and function.”
“Users can provide quick input to the Interactive Tile on the Start screen. With a perception of Start as an entrance page, Interactive Tiles were introduced to empower the start screen with an intermediate access level to applications.”
Sometime in the future, Live Tiles for apps like weather and calculator could become so useful that you’ll rarely need to bother opening their full-screen versions. An updated weather tile on the Windows start screen could allow users to tap on each day of the week for a condensed forecast, and the Xbox Music tile could give greater control over song playback. It looks as though Microsoft wants Live Tiles to grow smarter and more capable, essentially acting more like widgets. For now, interactive tiles remain very much in the experimental phase, so there’s no telling if or when they’ll make the jump to Windows proper.
