Hello power
Motorola decided to re-enter the phone flagship market in 2020 with Motorola Edge family. A top notch phone that unified efforts from all the Moto Design Team across Brazil, U.S. and China.
We delivered an outstanding industrial design product powered by beautiful and minimalist software design. My role as a UX Designer was to plan the Wireless Charging and Power Sharing experience, so the user can make the most of the 5,000mAh battery.
First step: Edge lights
In designing the charging experience for this phone, we had to take advantage of the curved display that allows more interactions and visual feedback to the users. In most devices the user has to pick up the phone to see how much it's charged, but with the edge lights we can deliver this feedback without so much user effort.
Users will see the edge lights first by connecting the phone to the charger – wired or wireless – with current battery status highlighted by the color: 1-15% battery in red, 16-100% in blue. If the user presses the power key or nudge the device face down while charging, the lights will also appear.
Power sharing
Imagine you’re leaving a restaurant with a friend but her battery is about to die. She needs to charge her phone to get an Uber to ride her home, but doesn’t have a charger, neither do you. Motorola Edger Plus has a feature that lets users share their battery power with other devices. Users can charge another phone, a bluetooth earbud, watch, anything that can be charged wirelessly and is Qi certified.
We created a way for the users to easily access the feature in the Quick Settings Menu. In the first time that it is activated the user will see a short tutorial explaining how to position the devices to get the charge in the fastest speed possible for this feature.
Besides the instructions in the tutorial, we also used the edge lights to help the user align the device that will be charged on top of the one that is power sharing.
During the design process, it was important to understand the physical position of the components inside the phone, also engineering limitations, such as how sensors would recognize a wireless charger, other wireless devices or the interactions that the users could do with the phone (nudge, pick up, etc.). Different teams were working on animations for the edge lights, so we had to create a visual system for the lights in different contexts.
