With all the news that’s been coming out lately pertaining to hardware, QNX and BES it is really easy to forget about the BlackBerry 10 software, and in particular the UI/UX designs that have been changed since OS 10.0 and most recently OS 10.3 developer build.

Cascades is a development framework that was designed from the ground up to be an efficient addition to our daily lives and the best design architecture for getting work done. Between some of the most obvious features like the Hub and Peek, it also has smaller features that aren’t necessarily the most obvious but certainly go a long way towards making work and tasks an ease to get done.

I really wanted to take some time to go through some of the UI/UX features in BlackBerry 10 Cascades that helps users do more with their time. The following is a list of some of the most useful ones built into BlackBerry 10; things that I personally use on a daily basis and have fallen in love with over the past year and a half. So with all that said let’s dive into Cascades: an exercise in utility.

The BlackBerry 10 Signature features:

While there is a lot packed into BlackBerry 10 to help us work more efficiently I thought I’d start off with some of the more obvious features. I’ll call them the signature features.

The first design element and feature is the most obvious one, even before venturing to the hub, and while I’m not sure it really has an official name, the BerryFlow crew has been calling it the “Home Gesture”. Wherever you are in the OS you need not exit an app or press a button to view your recent notifications. Just swipe up from the bottom of the screen and hold to see a list of your notification icons (i.e. whether you received a BBM, email, Facebook message, etc). Further to this action is that it also automatically changes the battery symbol in the top left of the screen to show the percentage of battery (as opposed to just showing the icon with a coloured amount of juice left).

The home gesture is also used to leave applications by sending them to the active frames pane or to peek/enter the Hub. And while I’m sure many of you reading might consider the Home Gesture a fancy way of entering and leaving apps it’s much more symbolic of the entire philosophy that BlackBerry 10 is built upon; constantly being in motion, multitasking, flowing between different apps, features and functions. The Home Gesture is actually a gateway or a launching point for users to do more with this one gesture. Users can enter the hub, peek at messages, or exit an app. It’s not just one discreet action. This is an important acknowledgement as we look at the upcoming features. It’s all about keeping a seamless, integrated experience that entices users to act and to do more with fewer steps.

Active Frames:

Adding onto the theme of the Home Gesture is the Active Frames. When a user exits an app it gets placed on the Home screen and becomes an Active Frame. These interactive frames can be used by developers to add information to them to give users a quick reference for information, or to simply provide a quick way to jump into and out of open apps. Depending on what apps you use the information that is displayed in an active frame can range from recent messages, to showing current weather, to scrolling through a news feed, or to showing miscellaneous facts pertaining to the application like Tundra Core’s Goal 2014 app pictured above. The possibilities are endless and are really up to what the developer chooses to show on their app’s active frame. Unlike Android’s widgets, the Active Frames aren’t interactive because they ARE the app, they aren’t just a widget they are equivalent to a minimized application on a laptop or desktop to pop in and out of quickly.

The Hub:

For those of you who haven’t had the chance to experience BlackBerry 10, the Hub is an unified inbox that consolidates all your notifications and messages. In general, if you receive a message on your phone it’s going to end up in the Hub. It’s one of the mainstays and one of the most iconic features of BB10. There’s no need to go looking through your app panes to find the relevant app that received a message; you just go to the Hub to see what’s going on. The key difference between the Hub and what Android and iOS offer with their notification centres is that the Hub isn’t just a place where you get notified it’s your starting and end-point for most messages and notifications. Got an email? Great, check it out in the hub. Want to reply to the email? Great reply to it in the same notification pane you were viewing the message in. The Hub doesn’t just send you to the email, BBM, Whatsapp or Facebook apps it IS those apps. In essence whenever you’re being called to action whether it’s to view or reply to a message, you’re not required to leave the Hub, and this is the main feature that continues the Cascades philosophy of doing more in fewer steps.

Furthermore, the Hub not only offers you a consolidated inbox for all your messages and notifications but it also is a comprehensive way of managing and filtering through different accounts and messages. It’s quite a robust tool that can be tailored to how you want to view your messages. Between choosing the order in which your messages show up in the Hub to identifying priority messages, the Hub really is the heart of BlackBerry 10 and a feature that I absolutely love.

Notification LED:

Almost as synonymous with BlackBerry as the QWERTY keyboard, the notification LED has had a long history on BlackBerry devices. The notification LED can be set to blink when you receive a message or notification. Being able to leave your phone on a table while doing work and having the peace of mind that you won’t miss a message because you can see the LED blinking is great, especially in work environments or other sound-sensitive areas where it’s not socially acceptable to have your phone ring. There are even third-party apps that expand this functionality to change the LED notification light colour to blue or yellow depending on what type of notification you receive.

Touch Keyboard:

Although BlackBerry has traditionally been known for their physical QWERTY keyboards, BlackBerry 10 has added a compelling touch keyboard offering that would entice even some of the most devout keyboard lovers. Much like how the Home Gesture is a launching pad for various different end-points, the touch keyboard is a launching pad for various different words, languages and symbols. I know, I know, isn’t every touch keyboard essentially a launching pad for words, languages and symbols? NO! When you start typing on the BlackBerry 10 keyboard and you’ll be confronted with various different words around the keyboard that you can add into your sentence with a simple flick of the finger. I often find myself physically pressing on four or five letters to make a 12-word sentence. It is absolutely astonishing how much time the BlackBerry 10 touch keyboard saves you while you’re typing, and although it’s not the easiest learning curve it certainly pays off once you get the hang of it. There are other keyboards on Android and other OS’ that do have some very impressive time-saving abilities when it comes to typing such as the Swift keyboard (which btw the BB10 keyboard is based off of). But unlike the Swift keyboard where you physically have to move your finger around the keyboard to touch the various letters you’re using while three predictions show at the top, the BlackBerry 10 touch keyboard shows you not one, not two, not three, but up to seven predictions. There are even some more goodies that come with the keyboard that I will talk about in the next section.

BlackBerry 10’s unsung heroes:

BlackBerry 10’s unsung heroes are the smaller features and tools that don’t quite get the spotlight but are essential to the Cascades user experience. These are features and functions that someone would typically make use of without much thought or acknowledgement.

Pinch to Filter:

Within the hub, one of my favourite features is the Pinch to Filter function. Users can setup their hub to filter to: unread messages, flagged messages, draft messages, meeting invites, sent messages and Level 1 Alerts. All you have to do is simply pinch the screen in the Hub and it will filter to your selected choice. I usually have mine set to filter to unread messages to make it quick and easy to access messages that need to be replied to or viewed. Those days of missing a text or BBM are a thing of the past!

Navigation Peek:

Native Cascades incorporates the use of “Navigation Panes”. Think of it like a deck of cards where you have the main initial card that adds cards on top of it one by one. That’s essentially how native apps function in BlackBerry 10, pushing newer pages on top of the previous ones. It doesn’t take long before you’re three or four pages deep and realize you quickly want to jump to an entirely different tab or section of the app. Users can hold the back button and drag it over to the right to show a Navigation Peek or shortcut to the main app tabs. Users don’t need to manually go through the countless pages just to end up back at the main screen, it’s a simple one step process. This is invaluable for quickly retrieving information from apps, especially reference tools like Web Design Cheat Sheet.

Context Menu:

One of the most underrated aspects of BlackBerry 10 is the context menu. This specific menu pops up when holding down on an item within an app to provide item-specific actions and functions. Think of it like a right-click button on your laptop. Apps usually have item-specific options placed here, like the ability to edit a location, share a location or delete a location, as seen in my app PinGuin. The difference lies in the fact that, unlike the overflow menu that is often present on the right hand side of the screen (three dots that say “more” underneath), the context menu is specific to what you are interacting with as opposed to a general function or option that deals with the entire screen.

While the idea isn’t a new one, it certainly isn’t as widely used in other Operating Systems. The ability to add this into your app on other OS’ is there through custom containers and animations, but it’s not baked into the development tools and OS like it is in BlackBerry 10.

Invocation Framework:

Native Cascades is a very powerful OS that allows developers and users to delegate functions and tasks to core system apps. This is called invocation. As a developer I use invocation to handle certain functions and tasks so that I don’t need to spend time coding and building them in. An example is the Camera function in my app PinGuin. Instead of creating the code to make use of the camera APIs, I simply invoke the camera app to take my pictures for me. My app then gets the information from the camera app on where the picture was saved as well as how it was named so that I can use that information to retrieve the image later on.

This is one example, but there are numerous other core apps that can be invoked to handle application tasks and further add to a more streamlined and uniform user experience when interacting with applications. It’s important to note that many strides have been made even in the Android Runtime to allow for this type of integration as well. One such example is that when you share something from an Android app, it actually invokes the Share Framework which is a core functionality for sharing app data.

Share Framework:

After using BlackBerry 10 for a while you’ll notice that most overflow menus or context menus contain a share option. When clicked it allows the user to share to any of the possible end-points like a social network, email, other application or even NFC/QR code. It is really a highly functional aspect of the OS that doesn’t get the admiration it deserves. From a developer’s perspective it requires minimal effort to setup the share framework. What’s more is that developers don’t have to individually add what social networks they want to share to; the OS handles it all automatically. The developer just has to identify what data they want to allow to be shared.

It’s a feature that has largely reduced my need to have a social network consolidation app so that I can post the same thing on multiple networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc. I now just use the share framework and it works marvelously.

Application Cards:

The share framework mentioned above incorporates a feature called “cards”. That’s to say that when you choose to share to twitter, it actually invokes the Twitter app and brings up a card to handle the process of sharing your cat pic, or other interesting news with the twittersphere. What’s more is that it doesn’t entirely open the whole Twitter up, but rather, opens up a tiny portion that is setup to handle sharing.

Sharing may be the most obvious example but developers also invoke other third-party applications to handle certain tasks as well, and are not just restricted to core applications. One example is the integration between BlackBerry Express and Mock It. BlackBerry Express is an awesome app that lets users create colourful and interactive presentations that can incorporate pictures. The app allows users the option to edit or add images using Mock It if they want. Say you have an image that needs some effects or alterations, you open up BlackBerry Express and when adding an image you can choose to alter it using Mock It before adding it to the presentation. It’s a great example of how the apps on BlackBerry 10 work together to fill-in functionality between each other.

Keyboard Gestures:

Not only does the touch keyboard offer an impressive prediction function, it is also makes use of gestures to switch between symbols, numbers, and letters. While typing on the keyboard simply swipe downwards and the keyboard will switch through the various symbols and numbers. Not only can users use gestures to switch between different characters, but they can also uses gestures to quickly delete words. Instead of tapping the delete button numerous times to delete a word, you just have to swipe to the left and the entire word is gone in one swift stroke.

Quick Languages:

If you’re trying to keep up with international business or just trying to keep pace with our ever globalizing economies you likely have some knowledge or communication in more than one language. Being able to switch between languages seamlessly and quickly while also being given the same advantages of predictive texting is essential to quick and easy communication. In BlackBerry 10, users can start typing in a different languagwe and the OS can automatically detect when a changeover has been made and will adjust the predictions accordingly. If you’d rather dictate when to change languages you can simply hold the microphone icon on the bottom left of the keyboard and select one of your languages.

Quick Picture Share/Edit:

Snapping pictures and sharing them on the fly is a breeze with BlackBerry 10. Users just have to open the camera app and take a photo. After taking a photo it’ll show up as a thumbnail on the bottom left of the screen. Users just have to tap and hold on the thumbnail and drag it across the screen to view the entire image as well as share it. BlackBerry 10 allows users to edit their images within the share framework. Want to share an image but you’d like to add a filter beforehand? You don’t even need to open the picture app and edit it, just share the picture and you can edit the picture from the share framework.

Keep Moving:

Built to keep you moving, BlackBerry 10 isn’t just an OS, it’s an entire philosophy revolving around our changing world and workflow. Features like the Hub’s consolidated inbox and Application Cards work to put you in control of your work. By providing a streamlined experience that doesn’t tie you down to one discreet function or use-case. It’s all about choice and being able to do more with less. That’s not implying that BlackBerry 10 has less, by any means, but that it requires fewer steps to accomplish many tasks.

This philosophy has constantly been updated since OS 10.0 and is sure to continue into 10.3 and above. With all eyes on BlackBerry over the fall period, it will be interesting to see how the features mentioned above can translate into devices like the Passport and the Classic. Especially how the planned “tool-belt” with trackpad will integrate with features like the Context Menu and the Home Gesture. We’ve already seen some leaked details about the Passport’s ability to use its physical keyboard for gestures and I have no doubt we’ll see some very neat integration in due time. Until then, Keep Moving.

Credit:

All images created using the Mock It app. You can find it here.

Special thanks to Tundra Core apps for giving me some sample images of their apps Goal 2014 and Shopping for eBay.

You can take a look at Tundra Core Studios and their BlackBerry App Catalogue here.

Other apps demonstrated in this write-up include Web Design Cheat Sheet and PinGuin.