Back when the Zune software for PCs came out way back in September one of the most obvious new features was the QuickPlay and its a feature I absolutely love, makes finding the music I am likely to want to listen extremely easy to find and play. But just thinking about it this interface needn’t be limited to only the Zune software.

Another great interface feature that has been introduced by Microsoft over the past year was Jump Lists in Windows 7. Why is this so great? Simply because you can access everything you are most likely to want to access within the application, saves a lot of time and button clicking.

As you can see both interfaces offer similar access to sections of an application so I think that not only will most applications benefit from the use of Jump Lists but equally most applications will benefit from a QuickPlay (or QuickAccess for most applications) screen.

Imagine if in Internet Explorer you were presented with a more interactive dynamic screen when opening a new tab than the current screen. There are no issues with the new tab page in IE8 which goes someway to bring quick access functions to the screen but its not exactly exciting or interesting to look at, in fact I don’t notice the page at all when its open. I think a more Zune like page would make for more interactions with sections for pinned web pages, frequently visited pages and recently visited web pages.

Taking this idea further it could be implemented in the Office Suite, with pinned documents, frequently accessed documents and recently accessed documents, or in Windows Live suite for example in Messenger for quick access to contacts and task with similar functionality as mentioned above.

Now some people would argue that there is no need for both QuickPlay and Jump Lists if they offer the same functionality but I often have applications open and it’d be easier just to jump to a different screen for quick access than using the Jump Lists and as the screen is more interactive and dynamic I much prefer to spend my time looking at the QuickPlay screen than the Jump List.

Lets hope we can see some further improvements to our applications from Microsoft, we have the ribbon now but can we also see the QuickPlay/QuickAccess screen taking a more prominent position within more applications.