Looking at the tiles not much have changed you could think, and yes I’ve not totally break the way they work.

The small changes I’ve made are only there to allow the new abilities of the tiles.

Now, each tile has two state:

One which display the app shortcup

The other which display the live purpose of the live tile.

The live purpose is different for each apps depending on what the developer wants to show on the live tiles.

But we can sum the different purposes in at least four categories:

Feed

Communication

Creation

Media

Feed

The feed tiles have as purpose to create incitement to open the app and to show quick information.

In this category we can find apps like:

The news app from Microsoft, which will display some news;

The calendar app, showing the coming events;

The photo app, displaying some pictures from your collection;

The Netflix app, showing some TV show;

The Store app, displaying some apps which could be interesting;

The Spotify app, showing some new albums.

Clicking on the tile will open the app and immediatly go to the feed which was display on the tile (news post, event in the calendar, a show on Netflix, etc.)

This kind of tile as explain above is not new and already exist, this feature is named chaseable and was announce with the anniversary update by Microsoft — even if only few app use it for now.

Communication

The communication tiles have as purpose to display the last notification to quickly inform the user about new messages coming.

In this category we can find apps like:

Skype/Telegram/Messenger/Whatsapp app, displaying the last message received;

The Mail app, displaying the last email received;

The Facebook/Twitter/Instagram apps, displaying the last notification.

Clicking on the tile open the notification displayed or go to the conversation for messaging app. It works exactly how notifications work now.

It’s different from the chaseable function of feed tiles because of the purpose which is different: a tap or click on the communication tile initiates an interaction between users, instead of consuming content or data.

Creation

The creation tiles have as purpose to display the last used event from a productive app, to let the user quickly go back to its work or creation.

In this category we can find apps like :

Word/Excel/Powerpoint, which will display the last opened document;

Affinity/Adobe, which will display the last opened content creation;

Edge, which will display the last visited site.

Why I’ve put Edge on the Creation category and not the Feed one? Because the purpose of those tiles is to help the user to go back to the last session used, and not incite the user to discover/try/learn new things.

So clicking on the tiles will automatically opened the app to the last used session, exactly how the Timeline works today.

Media

The media tiles have as purpose to also display the last used session. I choose to create a fourth category because even if they also display the last used event as creation tile, the purpose of them is not to bring the user back into work or production, but just to bring back ambiance or mood.

But with the recent feature of sets for Windows 10, it’s totally possible to imagine that instead of thinking by apps, we can think about sessions built from different apps used at the same time.

For example, if your working on an essai on Word with some music in the background from Groove and web pages on Edge, and all of that in the same window with different tabs — by clicking on either the media tile or the creation tile, it will bring back all the tabs to help the user bring back all its session.

So yes, media and creation tiles are not so different because their all about used event, and we can definitively think about merging those two categories.

In this category, we can find apps like:

Groove Music

Soundbyte

Movie & TV

Apps like Netflix or Spotify could also be in this category too. It should depend on the will of the developers, if they prefer to incite new content for the users or to help them bringing back their last used media.

Design

Now we’ve defined the four categories of live tiles, depending on their purpose and how they react on click/touch, I can show here some concept of how it could looks.

Examples of live tiles

To allow tiles to have new function without forgetting the shortcut purpose of them, I’ve thought about creating two states and two areas for each kind of tile.

As it can be seen in the picture above, there are one lighter area and one darker:

The lighter one is for the feature which depend of the kind of tile (feed, communication, creation, media);

The darker one is for the app shortcut

By default:

When there is an activity to show, the live tile display its live purpose by making the lighter area bigger (left)

When there is no activity to show, the live tile display the app shortcut by making the darker area bigger (right)

To switch between the two states using a mouse, you just have to hover the smaller area to make it bigger and change the state.

So if you want to open skype but not directly to the conversation corresponding to the last received message, just hover the darker area at the bottom to expand it, and click on it.

Conclusion

The idea behind all those changements is to rethink the start menu as the one place to go when users want to initiate something on their device.

If you want to open your last word document, open the Start Menu and click on the Word tile;

If you want to listen new music, open the Start Menu and click on the Spotify tile to go to some new content;

If you want to just open Edge, open the Start Menu and click on the bottom part of the Edge tile;

If you want to bring back your last movie, open the Start Menu and click on the Movie & TV tile;

Etc.

But if you want to have a deeper view of:

Last used events, just open the timeline;

All unused events (notification), just open the notification center.

This new feature for live tiles and the Start Menu should help users to use more efficiently their device by bringing content and creation closer to them.

This evolution also reduce the wobbly state of the current Start Menu which today works as a luncher and a limited notification center, by rethinking it not as a limited area but a shortcut area for: