What’s on Your Home Screen, Erica Joy Baker?
Order and purpose from a principal group engineering manager at Microsoft
This is “What’s on Your Home Screen?” a Q&A column from OneZero. We want to understand more about how people use their smartphones — those life-consuming devices we dump hours into every day — to pave a way toward a better future. Or at least a more reflective one. We’ll add new entries regularly, and each will feature a new interview with a notable person about the apps they use, how they’re organized, and whether those red bubbles drive them nuts.
Erica Joy Baker, an engineering manager at Microsoft, knows how to organize a home screen. Each section is color coordinated. Apps are clustered according to purpose. There are some — but not many — notification badges.
One key: She keeps a separate device for business. Many of us have never lived in a world where we would have, say, a “BlackBerry for work.” Instead, we consent to our employers having some control over our devices so that we can have fingertip access to services like Slack or Asana, blurring the line between our professional and personal lives. Convenient? Sure! But maybe not wise in a world that’s already overstuffed with “everything” devices.
