When the Nokia and Microsoft partnership was announced last year, Nokia was given special rights to modify the Windows Phone user interface. Below are some samples of a complete redesign possibly being developed by Nokia, submitted by a former employee:

The designer of this particular user interface concept no longer works for Nokia, but it is unlikely that she would spend all the time developing it, if she wasn’t being paid to do so. Still, last February, when asked if Nokia planned to alter the Windows Phone UI, Chief Technology Officer Rich Greene said:

‘We certainly do, in the context of this agreement, have the right to manipulate the UX, the UI, etc. but…I’m not speaking for the plan, I’m speaking as the Chief Technology Officer: Why would you? Let me clarify. There are so many places to innovate, it is critically important to provide the greatest opportunity for you the developer, you build once and everybody gets it, when you create more and more variance it becomes a hindrance. We also want customers to move between devices, preferably towards Nokia devices, but move between devices and not to hinder that in any fashion. The hardware and additional services we can offer will bring people to us, but if there are unfamiliar with a different environment, there may be a barrier to that, so why do it? The other issue is would I rather invest our resources in building really cool augmented reality applications or move tiles around? It just doesn’t make sense. We’re going to invest much more of our time, as we should have over the years, building on the platform as opposed to building in the platform. There’s unlimited amounts of opportunity to differentiate and innovate in these things.”

It would appear that Nokia isn’t very interested in refining the Windows Phone UI at all, but the concept images hint at possible notions at redesign at some point. When asked about the concept mockups, Nokia stated that the images “are purely her (the former employee) own personal design explorations and were never part of any project being done at or for Nokia.” Perhaps the employee is just really into Windows Phone…