Multiple Homescreens are nowadays commonly found in high-end portable digital devices like the smartphones and tablets. They are considered amongst the attractive features of a device with new gadgets increasingly having more no. of screens. The new iPhone/iPad is supposed to have 11 home screens.

The rational for having multiple homepages is pretty straightforward: with increasingly sophisticated devices allowing people to install a lot many applications and games, more amount of real estate is required for the user to place the icons for regular access.

But whether multiple homescreens are the right solution for the purpose is debatable in my opinion, especially with respect to the issue of ‘Findability’. Let’s envision a scenario: If i’m using an iPhone, with 11 screens, and I suddenly feel like playing a particular game or opening a particular document saved on one of the screens, it would require me to flip through the various screens (maybe 10 swipes), scanning each one of them individually, till I find the particular icon/file. Simple enough, but not the best method always I’d say.

People do try to remember and organize stuff to help themselves out (though many don’t). Even if we assume that people have taken the pain of categorizing icons & files across the screens as per certain themes (e.g. office/multimedia/networking), it still doesn’t take away the fundamental issue with the pattern itself: lack of user’s understanding of the relative orientation of these screens. If I’m having one screen in front of me, which way do I start swiping to quickly find the item that I’m searching for? Especially if one is in a hurry, this can be quite bugging, as it makes you ‘think’ everytime. The indicator dots at the bottom don’t help much. 

If we look at the ways the issue of ‘findability’ has been addressed at other platforms, there are a no. of examples that can be pointed out:

- Location of certain important/popular items tend to be fixed e.g. On the desktop, certain key items like My Computer, My Documents etc. tend to have a fixed location, under the Start Menu or as icons on the desktop.

- On e-commerce websites, there is the option to view items in ‘Grid’ (focused on images) or ‘List’ view (focused on text/name). We also use the same variation while searching for files on our computer; grid view is helpful while looking out visually, while List/Detail view becomes relevant when the name or certain file detail is the reference.

- On email clients (gmail, yahoo), the items are listed by default as per date/time; always showing the latest ones first.

- While searching for files on the desktop; we tend to sort items as per ‘Type’ (Folders, Word, PDFs etc.) which shortens the scope/list for the user to look into.

Thus taking inspiration from these examples, there can certainly be few design alternatives that can be tried out to help the users quickly find they’re looking for on their phone/tablet without necessitating any forced methods of organization. It is important to remember that the attempt here is to help the user avoid 7-10 swipes (between multiple screens), avoid the dilemma of thinking everytime, and save time.

- Allowing the users to fix the location for certain icons (e.g. a desired portion of the screens - 1/2 rows), which doesn’t change when the screens are flipped through, and could contain the most important/popular items of the user.

- Allowing the user to switch to List view, with items across all screens listed out collectively (using a scroll). The files could be sorted as per their ‘type’ (games/applications/documents) to help shorten the search. This could be specifically beneficial when the files becomes a lot in number. Probably, rather than having multiple home screens, one could even choose to retain this as the default view. 

- Allow user to allocate names (as per their personal organization methodology) to the different home screens, and further provide short-cuts to them from the default home screen. Showing a couple of most popular icons from each screen alongside could further help in quick identification and recall.

Just a few quick ideas which probably could be worked upon considering that we’re moving towards more amount of content on our portable devices, with increasingly bigger screen sizes, and hence more complicated scenarios.