Skip to main content

Your submission was sent successfully! Close

Thank you for signing up for our newsletter!
In these regular emails you will find the latest updates from Canonical and upcoming events where you can meet our team.Close

Thank you for contacting us. A member of our team will be in touch shortly. Close

An error occurred while submitting your form. Please try again or file a bug report. Close

  1. Blog
  2. Article

Grazina Borosko
on 24 May 2016


Last year we were working on OOBE redesign with the aim to improve first user experience with Ubuntu phone. Now the Design Team is working on the second part of this project which we call Edge Education.

The purpose of Edge Education is to aid discoverability and to educate users into using them naturally. For example, did you know what you can access the whole system by swiping from the edges of the screen.

How many edges Ubuntu phone has?

At the moment, the Ubuntu phone has four edges that can be interacted with in six ways.

Left short swipe

If you short swipe across the left edge you will open the launcher.

Left long swipe

You can quickly come back from any app to the Dash by a long left swipe.

Top swipe

Swiping from the top edge will give you access to indicator menus.

Right long swipe

Long swipe from the right edge will open the switcher to let you move between open apps.

Right short swipe

Swiping from the right edge you will switch between your current and previous app (ALT-TAB interaction).

Bottom swipe (app specific)

Swiping from the bottom edge brings you different functionality depending if you are in app or scope. Not all apps has a bottom edge. If an app has a bottom edge you will know this by seeing a bottom edge hint. For example, you can add a new contact by swiping from the bottom edge in the Contacts app. By doing bottom edge swipe in the scopes you can quickly favourite and unfavorite your scopes.

Related posts


Erin Conley
10 July 2025

In pursuit of quality: UX for documentation authors

Documentation Article

Canonical’s Platform Engineering team has been hard at work crafting documentation in Rockcraft and Charmcraft around native support for web app frameworks like Flask and Django. It’s all part of Canonical’s aim to write high quality documentation and continuously improve it over time through design and development processes. One way we i ...


Lyubomir Popov
23 June 2025

Improving our web page creation workflow: how structured content is slashing design and development time

Ubuntu Article

Co-authored with Julie Muzina A year ago, during our Madrid Engineering Sprint, we challenged ourselves to dramatically reduce, or even eliminate, the need for constant design involvement in the day-to-day creation of web pages. Our strategy for achieving this is based on a smarter, more structured approach to content. The challenge: brid ...


Leia Ruffini
14 April 2025

How we ran an effective sprint to refresh our design website, Part 1

Design Article

Part 1 of how we ran a design sprint to refresh our website. Sharing what worked, what didn’t, and lessons from designing for open source in mind. ...