Personalization for your phone, that was what Themes was all about. Change icon-packs, (interactive) wallpapers, custom color schemes.  Themes was my responsible area at Sony. I worked close to the Product owner and the dev-team to make Sony users be able to customise their phone just the way they want (almost!).

 

When I started at Sony, the flow to download a theme forced the user to jump between 3 different applications. They all worked differently and looked completely different. The Themes-app itself only contained themes changed wallpapers. I asked "Does our users understand the difference between changing wallpaper and changing Themes?".The themes we built at Sony were advanced, far more advanced than any other competitor. Our wallpapers could animate, you could even interact with them. You can create custom icons and change primary and secondary colors of the phone. Together with the PO, we worked to try to cut as many contextual switches as possible and also let the user easily download a few selected-themes for free. Those free themes should be ambassadors of the possibilities with themes.

 

To create the different themes Sony had also developed a desktop tool, Theme creator, where users could create interactive wallpapers and create custom icons packs. I also designed this tool.

 

A grand vision was to take the Theme creator into the phone, making it easy for people to create their own theme right in the palm of their hand, and share it with friends. I designed a concept that was presented in an internal fair in Tokyo. It received fantastic feedback from employees and I also demo’ed the prototype to the CEO. Unfortunately Themes was later shutdown when Sony downscoped their mobile development, just before we were about to release the new mobile theme creator.

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