I've stumbled upon a post on Medium, that says that the home screen concept is outdated for mobile devices.
I think that home screen is great for basic user (thinking about my mother) as a "safe" starting point.
What do you think? Is there any research in this topic?
There is a fundamental weakness in the author's design approach, which is he doesn't state what problem he's trying to solve. Instead, he just starts by sketching a "home-less" UI which he thinks will look cool....i.e he's starting with an imagined solution rather than trying to solve a problem.
By failing to properly consider user workflows for the UX, he is unlikely to come up with good UX design.
There are too many to enumerate here, but some of the more common/modal flows are:
The home screen provides users with immediate access to apps and (depending on the OS) notifications.
The "home-less" design creates some immediate problems with the workflow:
You add one more level of interaction and one more cognitive hurdle (user has to swipe just to get to the tray, and then wait for it to animate, cognitively process the animated screen, and then make a selection) between the user and the task she wants to accomplish. UX designers know instinctively that this is not a good idea for a phone that the average user will pick up 200+ times a day!...you want to reduce, rather than add UX friction.
You overload the swipe-up function on the screen, i.e. within the context of an open app, swipe-up now means 2 different things. For example, imagine opening a web page, and then swiping up in order to scroll the web page down. Suddenly, an app tray opens instead of the page scrolling! How about if we just make the app tray appear if the user swipes from a corner or from the bottom edge of the screen? BAD IDEA!!! You now have the same gesture mean totally different things depending on where the user starts it, with no visual labelling for where each gesture should begin. Which brings us to the next point...
You are taking an explicit feature (dedicated home button) and making it implicit. Nooooooooo! There are almost 2 billion smartphone users around the world...it's a terrible design idea to have one of the most common functions (app tray) be accessed via an invisible, unlabelled gesture! This is like having a door with no clearly visible handle or label (just push to open) or a car with no visible ignition button (touch the steering wheel or press the brake to start the engine)....these designs may sound or look cool but they are terrible ideas.
There may be some merit to consolidating the app screen, recent apps and notifications. But the way to do this is NOT to start with a solution in mind ("I want a home-less UX") but rather to consider actual user workflows and have design flow from those key tasks and flows.
This is not an easy design problem....cellphones are a $200 billion industry so there are some huge R&D dollars at work here with mobile operating system UX. I know some of the OS designers and they are phenomenally talented individuals and teams. I'm sorry to be harsh but the design proposed here is not properly conceived and flawed from the very outset because it doesn't provide a streamlined way to address some very fundamental user flows for mobile phones.
Searching around, I can't find any specific reasoning for having it. But the home screen is the continuation of the 'desktop' UI that has been the basis of all UIs since the Xerox Alto.
iOS is merely an extension of OS X, so it's fairly natural to keep the desktop concept.
It allows the user to have a section of the mobile OS that they can fully personalise to be how they want it - either with nothing on it, or every widget that they can find on it.
