Creating Live Tiles for Windows Phone Apps is hard

In this article i will give you our lessons leaned creating our live tile for the XING-App for Windows Phone.

The Live Tiles are the #1 differentiator for Windows Phone apps to other platforms.
Creating a good live tile is hard and needs several iterations.

XING-App live tile iterations

With Windows Phone 7.5 codename "Mango" the live tile become a backside. In the first version the user gets informed with a little icon of the backside live tile if you have new messages or visitors.
More information come with the next app release. Besides the information if you have new messages and visitors you can also see how many. Also some new information come with it. So you can see how many contact request you have and how many contacts has his birthday.
The fail of both versions are. You need to wait until the live tile turn around to his backside to see this information. It can be faster to lunch the app instead of wait until the information is visible.
The idea was to bring this information in front of the tile and to have a detail view in the backside of the tile.
The question that comes up after it, do we really need the backside anymore?
All we need to do is to find significantly icons and the information behind it.
Now we have all information available immediately.