BBERRYNEWS

Inside BlackBerry sat down with Joey Benedek, Director of UX Research at RIM. The UX organization is responsible for understanding user needs and desires and translating those into interface designs. Benedek walks us through some of the new features in BlackBerry 6 and confirms a lot of what we’ve seen in leaked videos.

For example, we know that BlackBerry 6 has five separate views that a user can switch between using the Navigation Bar, depending on their preference and the type of information they’re looking for. The five sections that are present on the homescreen include:

• Frequent
• Favorites
• Downloads
• Media
• All

By creating these five sections, users have less icons shown at once, making the user experience much more smooth. Another new feature described by Benedek is the new Quick Access Areas of which there are two. The first Quick Access Area is designed so you have fast access to the Connections, Alarm and Options screens. These are things that users want to frequently change or adjust and BlackBerry 6 allows you to do this quickly.

The other quick access area on the Home Screen is designed to enable you to view your most recent messages (such as email, text, BlackBerry Messenger), phone calls, upcoming appointments, Facebook and Twitter notifications simply by tapping the Notification Bar in the middle of the top of the Home Screen. If you click on the Notification Bar, it drops down to show who the notifications are from, along with the first few words from the title. This feature makes it much easier to prioritize which notifications you want to respond to first.

There are a host of other screenshots and details about BlackBerry 6 from Inside BlackBerry so check them out.

© BlackBerry Cool for BlackBerry Cool, 2010