Notification Widgets

These are by far my favorite and also the most interesting homescreen elements. Notification widgets are simple, beautiful and extremely interactive in an easily understandable way.

At first sight, Notification Widgets look much like Windows 8's live tiles. However, they're much more powerful.

In their normal state, without any pending notifications for an application, they look and act exactly like Static Icons. However, as soon as a notification arrives, it will show up next to the app logo, or if the widget is sized 1x1 it will show ahead of it.

The user has got two options to interact with a notification:

Interaction 1: Tapping once on it will hide the notification. Doing so, the widget will switch back to the normal state with the app logo.

Interaction 2: Tapping twice expands the notification. This means that not only the application will open, but that the user will also directly be guided to where the notification occurred/where it is relevant (for example directly to the right conversation within a messaging app or to an article within a newsreader app).

The great thing about these widgets are that they're very easy and clean, yet they give the user much power. It's not just tons of "Live Tiles" bouncing around with unhelpful info like on Windows 8, but the user has the possibility to hide anything uninteresting or to open relevant info. You should also understand that Notification Widgets should not display "You might be interested" stuff, but real notifications (like usually found in the notification bar on Android and iOS).