Windows Phone Calculator – Design Success or Failure?

I was just trying out a couple of things on the Windows Phone emulator and came across some hidden features of the calculator application. Having started the calculator and I did a basic sum and thought, great it’s a very basic, clean looking, calculator.

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Then I accidentally hit the rotate button on the emulator and wow, there’s some hidden buttons that weren’t available in portrait mode.

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How on earth was the user supposed to find those buttons? I went back to portrait mode and looked for visual clues to indicate that there were some hidden buttons or that I should rotate the device. Nothing….

My question is does this constitute good Windows Phone application design? I suspect my answer is that it’s not finished and that there is some refinements still to be added. Whilst visually appealing the lack of any visual clues is a complete fail. Hopefully we’ll see this addressed before Windows Phone ships.

Don’t create Easter Eggs in your application, make sure there are some clues to allow the user to explore your application and locate all the functionality you painstakingly added to your application.

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