Design Principles

Effortless interaction

Interaction with Sailfish devices is effortless even in a hectic mobile environment. The core interactions are based on simple gestures, supported by visual, tactile and audio feedback. This enables users to interact with the device via the complete screen estate instead of forcing them to tap on tiny buttons, requiring stretching fingers or moving the device up and down within their hands. As an added bonus this permits to reveal more content during these gestures.

True multitasking at its best

We tend to do a lot things with our phones at once involving several apps at the same time. Sailfish supports true multitasking, allowing you to quickly and seamlessly move around running apps. This keeps you up to date, enables you to fetch and play content and get something done even after pushing the app away from the foreground.

Reflect your ambiance

In Sailfish, personal style and cooperation with brands are valued. The easy tailoring of the user experience enables users to create a truly individual device, reflecting their personal style and ambience. Cooperation tailoring can reflect a brand and at the same time integrate offerings and services deeply into the Sailfish OS.

All screen estate is yours

For the user, content is one of the most important parts of the user experience. In Sailfish the UI Chrome, the static screen estate reserved by the OS, is reduced to an absolute minimum letting the user content shine.

Simply beautiful

Sailfish designs are simple, beautiful and uncluttered. Content is presented clearly, text is legible, animations, haptics and sounds follow an overall theme and support user interactions. The visual style is simple, though warm and friendly; it is based on metaphors of glass and shining light.

Logical

Sailfish designs are logical and consistent. Consistency means here that similar interaction flows and visuals are reused for similar tasks. Combined, these create more fluent task flows and greater user satisfaction since users can apply a flow they’ve learned easily in other areas.

Magical

Instead of just doing something different, the intention behind Sailfish is to always improve, innovate and create magical design. Such solutions to problems make the user’s tasks easier, more pleasant and therefore create a positive surprise, in fact, to make the user smile a smile.

Integrated services

Sailfish features frameworks that enable a deep integration of services. Users can access service related content and options during their core tasks instead of opening and closing a set of dedicated apps. Developers are able to hook into frameworks via plug-ins and thus speed up development time. A single plug-in is normally much easier to develop than a full UI for service features.