These four tips for arranging iPhone apps make your phone more organized and efficient to use, and the apps more accessible.
An iPhone is only as useful as the apps you keep on it—and how quickly you can get to them when you need them. I have a few strategies for how I arrange my apps to help keep them organized, put them in easy reach of my fingers, and thus increase my efficiency by reducing the time it takes me to find the apps I use most often.
Sometimes, people inadvertently believe that being "organized" means their apps should be in a certain order from left to right, or top to bottom. I disagree.
Here are four tips for keeping your iPhone apps truly organized. If you're a novice iPhone user, you'll find a quick how-to at the end of each tip.
The home button of an iPhone (the round one) and the app dock (the area where you can lock four apps to the bottom of the screen) are near one another on iPhones for a reason. They're meant to be areas of the phone you touch most frequently, which explains why Apple kept them together: for efficiency.
Similarly, the nearest areas of the screen are also what I like to call "hot spots" or zones where you fingers hover most often.
If you use your thumbs to navigate your phone and are right-handed, your hot spots are probably the lower right corner and leftmost column.
Because I don't have dexterous thumbs, I hold my phone in a slightly unusual way. I hold it in the palm of my left hand and use the middle finger of my right hand to tap and swipe. As a result, my hotspots are the bottom two rows of the home screen.
You may have already utilized your hotspots, wherever they happen to fall for you, by putting your most-used apps in those locations. But if not, be sure to take advantage of those zones.
How to move an app: If you're a true iPhone beginner, you can move apps around the screen by pressing and holding any app until it jiggles, which means the apps are now unlocked. Now simply hold and slide around the screen the apps until they are where you want them. Need to delete an app? Just tap the 'X' in the upper left corner. Apps without an 'X' cannot be deleted. When you're finished, just tap the home button once.
2. Consider Clustering
The second trick is to cluster your apps. By "clustering," I mean position them near one another on the screen, but not in a folder (using folders is a different trick). It takes an extra tap to open a folder, and while one tap might seems trivial, there's a whole field of research devoted to measuring how much time we waste with unnecessary movements and keystrokes. Those unnecessary motions add up!
You've likely already clustered your four most frequently use, or most "important" (however you define it) apps in the dock and around your primary hot spots. Clustering works in other areas, too, though.
On the second screen of my phone, I have clustered together a few social media apps: Vine, Facebook, Flickr, and Pinterest. I "hang out" in that cluster when I'm relaxing and using my phone to leisurely check out what's new. I keep them on the second screen, rather than the first, because I don't want to tempt myself into looking at those apps too frequently. I reserve the home screen for apps that are more important to me.
Another example might be if you travel often for business, you could cluster together you preferred airline's app, a scheduling app, and maybe an office suite app.
How to put apps in the dock: You can only have four apps in the dock at a time. To change which ones are there, tap and hold any app until they jiggle. Then hold and slide an app out of the dock to free up space. You can now fill that empty slot with a different app. You can also change the order of the apps in the dock by pressing and sliding them. When you're done, press the home button once.
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