The New Quick Settings

Prototyping, Usability Testing
Background
We flipped the settings panel on our smart feature phone OS. We needed to make some design decisions and prototyping helped us discover the downside of the new design style.

There were 3 objectives for the test:
● What element should be the starting point when a user opens the settings panel?
● Could we find any issues with the new UI style?
● What animation style for the media control would be effective?
Prototypes
The starting point
Design #1 was starting from the center: some people just felt weird that it started from the center but some other people liked this design because the starting point allowed them to access other elements much quicker; Another design #2 was starting from the top left of the screen: all people had no problems at all and some people felt that the starting point met their expectation.
Background color indicates grouping
Some toggles were affected by the status of others, so those toggles were better to stay together in the same group.
● Some people just didn't notice that the status of the Wi-Fi toggle was also changed.
● Some people were wondering why the status of the Wi-Fi toggle was changed since both toggles were in different groups and seemed unrelated to each other.
Animation styles
I tested out some different animations for the media control element and these two worked well. Somehow, we were required to review the performance issue due to the fact that the OS would be running on some really low-end devices.
More computing required
Doable