Taking iOS11’s Notification Pane to its logical conclusion
With iOS11, Apple has decided to combine the Lock Screen and the Notification center into one element called the “Notification Pane.” Apple had been hinting at this change with prior iOS releases. For example, the widgets section moved out of notification center in iOS10 and into the Lock Screen. It’s a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I actually like this change. If Apple’s gonna have both the lock screen and notification center duplicate information, then it makes sense to combine them.
The problem is Apple hasn’t quite fully embraced this change and the OS has become more confusing for it. Below you’ll find my thoughts on how Apple can take this joint Notification Pane concept to its logical conclusion. But first, we have to go all the way back to the last major iOS redesign (iOS7) to understand why the way Apple has implemented Notification Pane is confusing.
When Apple introduced iOS7, they also introduced the concept of ‘functional layers.’ The idea was that each element of the OS, like Control Center, the Home screen and Notification Center lived in a separate layer. This was a very clean and elegant design concept that instantly made sense, particularly with the heavy use of translucency throughout the interface.
Every subsequent release has scaled back on the more extreme elements of the iOS 7 design paradigm (Everything is a little less flat now). As Apple has added new features like Widgets and interactive notifications, things have gotten a little more complicated as well.
The behavior of this new hybrid element is different depending on how you invoke it. Another weird duplicative feature is the Widgets screen; which has 2 different layouts, depending on how you got there as well.
If you map out iOS UI navigation, you get something like this:
The Notification Center layer is by far the most inconsistent of the 3. By default, you see the Notification Pane. If you swipe to the left, you get the Big Clock version of the Widgets screen. If you swipe to the right, you get the Camera App.
Here’s where it can get even more confusing. If you just woke up your phone, then you get a locked version of the Notification Pane home screen (signified by a hard-to-see locked icon). You can swipe left and right for widgets and camera, but you can’t swipe up to go anywhere else.
On the other hand, if you get to Notification Pane by pulling down from the top, it allows you to get back to what you were doing by pulling up from the bottom of the screen.
The weirdest thing about this layer is the Camera App. Writing this article I noticed that this instance of the Camera App is completely different from the one you access through the home screen. It makes for an amusing loop:
On the Home Screen, you can swipe to the left to go to a slightly different widgets screen that has no large clock (there doesn’t seem to be a good reason for why there’s no clock in this view). And finally, you can tap any app icon to open an app in the app layer. From here, you can pull down to go to the Notification Pane again, or press the home button to go to the first screen of App icons.
Simplifying the paradigm.
I think Apple can easily remove one of the three layers. This would simplify and clarify the UI; and the functionality wouldn’t have to change much. This is how I would design this new two-layer paradigm:
The combined Home / Notification Layer makes navigation a lot simpler. Instead of the Camera App to the right in this layer, users would be able to navigate their traditional rows of icons. The Widgets section remains to the left (but only the Big Clock version).
The addition of a persistent dock is a natural extension of this new iPad feature. The Siri suggestion app would default to the Camera App when the phone is locked. This solves another issue with the lock screen camera app: the slide-to-the-right Camera we have right now is sticky and glitchy.
This is what this new interface would look like in action:
I think this makes navigating the OS a lot more fluid and quick. The only small usability concession that breaks this paradigm is the Notification Center fading in when sliding down from the top on the Home Layer.
Another benefit of this paradigm is it makes the Home button completely unnecessary to navigate the interface; which would come in handy with the rumored home button-less iPhone 8.
