[Aloha]

Windows Phone had the best UX of any of the mobile operating systems, it was something I could hand to a user who'd never had a smart phone before, and it was much more intuitive for them - they could figure it out without help.

Sadly they never got enough market share (or perhaps investment by MS to pay for third party apps to get developed) to get the pool of Applications needed to attract users, which is unfortunate.

The one side effect of the 'easy to newcomers' UX, was experienced users had to forget a bit about what they knew about how a mobile device was supposed to work to use it - thats not a huge barrier, but I suspect it also made adoption by existing power users a little slower.

[ckz]

IMO your last line there really hits the nail on the head with what I saw both on the ground and in the data.

Windows Phone was absolutely crushing it with first-time smartphone adopters, but for folks switching it was tougher, because WP didn't use depend on the whole "grid of siloed apps" concept as much. If you'd already used an iPhone, it took a second to unlearn.

And considering anyone making smartphone apps in 2010 was still on the early-adopter side of the curve--they'd already experienced that way of using a phone. There were still a lot of first-timers in the following 5 years, but the folks at the agencies and companies making the software weren't them.

[tsunamifury]

No this... was not true. I did extensive usability testing on MetroUI and it confused users as it lacked visual cues, had massive homogeny issues between functions, and lacked visual differentiation enough to let me remember where anything was.

Hate it or love it, skumorphism educated billions on how to use a smartphone -- no one else even came close.