They’ve tapped twice and the launch sequence has been initiated. A line of personal creations is now floating in front of them, hoping to be picked. It’s a nervous moment. It’s a chance to be reembraced or jetissoned off with the smallest of flicks. Your app may end up wherever there is beyond the background or finally fully appreciated again in the foreground.

If this were recess basketball team selection you’d want to stand up a little taller, look the part, make it clear what you offer. You’d put on your best face for the moment, wouldn’t you? You’d at least want to make sure you were optimized for viewing, or for the view that you were in.

You wouldn’t want to look just like you had the last time they saw you, would you? In many cases you wouldn’t want to look the same as the last time when they decided to leave you. Most of all you wouldn’t want to look squeezed into the space given you, out of place and hard to read.

That’s how the vast majority of apps look in the multitasking view on iOS and Android. They’re shrunken down, smashed into the small space given, hard to view in a neglected view. Hard to make out like a website without a mobile site.

One day when swiping through the multitasking view something stopped the next swipe. It was a little red circle. It forced me to stop like a red stop light and it grabbed my attention. It wasn’t one on an app icon, I’ve disabled every one of those, but this one was inside of the multitasking view of an app.

Of course the app (Facebook) got opened, another Like was added to a future hall of fame stats, and a few more seconds subtracted from the train ride. More important than the stats though, since you know I don’t play for the stats, was the thought process it started.

What if those bottom tabs or mini-notification areas were the focus of the multi-tasking view? What if Facebook made sure there was no way a user could miss when they a notification when they were in the multitasking screen? They wouldn’t even have to ask permission to serve that notification, a user couldn’t even shout, “Get off my lawn!” at the notification. What if when the viewer didn’t have notifications Facebook enlarged the text in a recent status for the multitasking view?

Could this all be possible?

At the time I was managing the product design at TenTen, a Bluetooth startup I cofounded in Tokyo. Central to TenTen are the points a user racks up, so we wanted to optimize the view to display points earned. This way users could know if they had reached the next level of rewards…

And the view worked, it was possible! And this got me thinking what if some other favorite apps might look like with this responsive multitasking view

Two Possible Implementations

Just to give a rough idea of how it might look in other apps.

Facebook:

It could be taken further probably, showing an optimized version of the notification page so the user knows exactly what the notification is tied to. Then again that might show that it’s just another mass-invitation to your “DJ” friend’s house music event, and stop another open. Sometimes it’s best to leave some things to the optimistic imagination…

Circa:

For many news related apps not much would be necessary. Just making the text bigger could really work to grab a users interest in a latest story and pull them back in. Probably the background images in my responsive version should be taken out for legibility and simplicity’s sake.