Drew Bamford, Assistant Vice President of User Experience, took to HTC’s blog yesterday to give us insight into why certain changes were made in HTC Sense 5 on the HTC One. Since the introduction of TouchFlo and Sense, HTC has been working to deliver a unified user experience which helps bring HTC phones to life.

Over the years, HTC’s software team has managed to tweak and refine the Sense experience, but with Sense 5, Bamford challenged his team “to step back and take a fresh look at the overall customer experience.” After observing how people used their phones and countless customer interviews, several consistent patterns emerged.

Most people don’t differentiate between apps and widgets.

Widgets aren’t widely used – weather, clock and music are the most used and after that, fewer than 10% of customers use any other widgets.

Most of you don’t modify your home screens much. In fact, after the first month of use, approximately 80% of you don’t change your home screens any more.

Rather than ignoring these user patterns, HTC decided to re-think the home screen for the HTC One and decided that most consumers didn’t want seven panels with dozens of application and widgets. They wanted something simple, dynamic and customizable – they wanted BlinkFeed. With BlinkFeed, HTC believes they are delivering a more compelling content experience right on the home screen, allowing the service to deliver fresh content (social media and news feeds) to consumers every time they turn on their phone.

While BlinkFeed is set as the default home screen on the HTC One, HTC has not forgotten that there are quite a few users who may not be interested in the service. To appeal to those consumers, HTC Sense 5 does allow the traditional home screen panel or the application drawer to be set as the default home screen.

Bamford was also interviewed by Phone Arena this week at Mobile Word Congress. When asked is the refined HTC Sense would allow for faster software updates to newer versions of Android, Bamford replied:

“We think we’re gotten quite good at integrating Sense with new versions of Android, so we think we’ll be very quick with updates. “

He also said that the new version of HTC Sense is more appealing to a broader base of customers, making it more usable and more compelling for a larger market segment. Having users HTC Sense 5 at the HTC One launch event, I can say with confidence that HTC has put a lot of work into making its software unique and compelling to users. BlinkFeed may not be very compelling to current HTC power users, but it could be very appealing to those who simply want to be fed information without having to install land keep up with multiple applications.

We definitely suggest you watch Drew Bamford’s interview and don’t forget to share your thoughts in the comments below.

Source: HTC Blog