Windows Phone Live Tiles - Help!

Would appreciate any feedback on this web page - be as harsh as you like.

Objective is to promote the related Windows Phone Apps by highlighting the availability of these live tiles.

NB At the moment some of the apps for the live tiles are not on the marketplace so you will get a not found when you click on the tile*.

Currently Silverlight 5 but suppose I will have to go HTML5 when I get time.

http://livetiles.co.uk/Beta/Default.html

Thanks.

Questions I am asking myself:

• Should it be full page or split into Master / Detail (ie instead of opening up the links to WindowsPhone.com)?
• Are the tiles the right size?  Should I allow resizing in situ?
• How is the timing of the flipping? Too much? Too little? Too annoying?
• How is the concept itself? Worthwhile?
• Do I really have to go HTML5?
• Will the concept work for Windows 8 live tiles as well?
• How can I open this up to other Live Tile apps and developers? Should I?
• Should Microsoft be doing something like this to better promote the concept of live tiles?

*OK I just put this up this morning = it works on my machine (so please let me know if it doesn't work on yours)

They flip too fast and none of the graphics look good.

Thanks, will slow down the tiles and maybe add a slider somewhere in options to control the default speed?

Can you elaborate when you say that the graphics don't look good?  Is it just my poor design skills or is it something technical?

Thanks for taking the time to feedback.

1 hour ago, Ian2 wrote

Questions I am asking myself:

• Should it be full page or split into Master / Detail (ie instead of opening up the links to WindowsPhone.com)?
• Are the tiles the right size?  Should I allow resizing in situ?
• How is the timing of the flipping? Too much? Too little? Too annoying?
• How is the concept itself? Worthwhile?
• Do I really have to go HTML5?
• Will the concept work for Windows 8 live tiles as well?
• How can I open this up to other Live Tile apps and developers? Should I?
• Should Microsoft be doing something like this to better promote the concept of live tiles?

• You could open the link in a sort of pop-up
• Bit to big, don't like the different colors, don't like the background color. No do not resize
• Too fast, slower flipping animation and not so many flipping tiles at once
• It's nice, the intent of the page doesnt become clear when I visit the page. Maybe a small header? Welcome internet person! Buy WP7!
• Yes, Silverlight is dead
• Yes, why not? Just make a dropdown or something to toggle between W8 and WP7
• How would you go about doing that?
• HELL YES!

You could do a jumplist like WP7 Toolkits longlist selector. But make the tile area smaller, and some explenation on the top of the page would be nice

• Don't copy/paste their exact logo or use a picture with a lot of details
• KISS and keep it Metro style (use text rather than graphics)
• Maybe it's best to just use the same background color as the original logo is and just use text to name the company/soccer club. For example: Birmingham city, ugly logo, just show white background and blue text: Birmingham City News. You should do this for pretty much all these ugly soccer club logos. Maybe show a tiny soccer ball in a corner and do this consistently for all soccer apps.
• When the tile flips and you show text, again KISS. Keep text at the bottom of the tile and think about hiding the date/time and only show the date if the item is more than 1 day old and only show the time if the item is older than 1 hour or so.

@Maddus Mattus:

Great, terrific feedback, thanks.

I think next step is to come up with some way to configure options for some of these ideas so I (we, he says hopfully) can try them out.  That said, I do want to keep it simple so options might just be a short term thing to test the waters and get some additional feedback.[quote]

ZippyV 

Thanks, I'm not really a designer - getting to simple can be very time consuming sometimes.  A lot of these tiles have been developed over quite a long period of time so it looks as though I should revisit them all at once with a redesign in mind.  Not sure where the time is going to come from though ...

EDIT:

Just put up a new version with slower flipping, both in terms of the speed of the flip and also the speed at which all the tiles flip.

Flip speed is now 0.8 second (previously 0.5)

Time before first flip is now between 5 and 25 seconds (previously between 3 and 15 seconds)

@Ian2: Still too busy, IMO. When 4 or 5 tiles get flipped at the same time and I can only focus on 1 at a time, my ADHD goes off like crazy!

@Maddus Mattus:Yeh, you are right, going to bring it right down .. standby ..

OK, Slow version is now up.  Might have a look at gestures to see if I can allow tiles to be flipped with a 'flick down' - that way if you are interested in a particular tile you won't have to wait around forever?  Hmmmm.

Might have the old one hanging around in your cache for a bit ....

OK, Have incorporated much feedback - graphic design of individual tiles pending.

Page now has an explanatory header, better tile rotation and also the option to rotate tiles individually by hovering over with the mouse.

http://livetiles.co.uk/Beta/Default.html

Time for bed methinks.

nice!

@Maddus Mattus:Thanks.  Going to do some tweeks for some of the tiles today picking up on some of ZippyV's feedback. 

Can't do the major overhaul now due to lack of time but can fix things like text alignment on the sports related tiles and also provide default images where the BBC haven't (which appears to be more common than I anticipated).

The hardest thing apears to be promotion - getting stuff seen by lots of people is really hard unless someone with more clout picks up on it.

@Ian2: If you want people to notice it, put it in a FaceBook page.

I will like it, then my posse will like it and you will be a gazillionaire in no time.

But, I still think the letters should all have the same color. Background should be black or white. Screensize should be half of what it is now, with some nice rounded borders or something. I always have a guy 'make it pretty', because as a programmer I'm pixel deficient.

@Maddus Mattus: Thanks, will give the Facebook thing a go. I deliberately used the Windows 8 colours for the letters but take on board the feedback.  I guess we are only talking about 20-30 mins to redo the letters the same colour - I will ponder further on that. Rounded corners? Hmmm. Pixel Deficiencies?  Hell Yeh  ... Might experiment with making it fit with my blog theme (http://WebSurfaces.co.uk)

OK, will no doubt tweek it over the next few days:

http://LiveTiles.co.uk

And here is my initial attempt at a Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/LiveTilescouk/236397449767454

@Ian2: I ment, host the page within FaceBook,..

I liked it, so prepare for mayhem

@Ian2:

Looks good!

How about laying it out like so;

A

tile, tile, tile, tile,

tile, tile, tile

B

tile, tile

C

tile, tile, tile, tile

etc.

with an small offset in the tiles to the right under the letter,..

@Maddus Mattus:I'll give it a go.  Thanks!

OK, without completely disrupting my XAML I have letters on a new line (additional indents would require me moving away from a wrappanel which requires all items to be the same dimensions)

It is up on http://livetiles.co.uk/Beta2/

Yeh, the dragging with your finger should be do-able, especially in WinRT (where I plan on doing something like this for Win8).  Problem is my HTML5 skills are sadly defficient so I am a little concerned about going from 'lovely' Silverlight to 'nasty' html but I will have to bite the bullet ...

@Ian2: What would really ROCK, is no scrollbar, but scrolling with mouse dragging,.. Kinda like you would with your finger,..

Wow, I went back in time to answer your finger scrolling idea, awesome ....

Thinking maybe those letters could be smaller now?