S60 Open to new features

"Simplify, simplify."
-Henry David Thoreau

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler."
Albert Einstein

Simplicity is one of the ideals we try to attain when designing the browser user interface. A reaction I'd like to evoke in browser users is "that was easy!" In general, easy is often associated with simple.

It's not always easy to pin down "simplicity" though. For one thing, it's very subjective. When you're accustomed to doing something in a particular way with specific tools, you come to regard it as simple. Introduce someone else to the process, though, and they may have a very different opinion. Not because you're smarter or more capable then this neophyte (it goes without saying that you are, of course, but one tries to be nice :-), it's because you have different knowledge.

The knowledge you rely on to determine what's "simple" includes things you may not regard as explicit knowledge. Hand your mobile to anyone you know and ask them to call a number. Most of them will find it "simple". Hand the same mobile to someone who's never seen a phone and the task isn't simple at all. The task is exactly the same; it's the user that's different. Although if asked to list all the things you know, you might not include "how to use a mobile phone"; it's something we tend to assume.

We design for simplicity, then, for a particular collection of users. Mobile phones are inherently complex devices, and some of the tasks users want to do are also very complex, so sometimes we "hide" the complexity, or put it somewhere else. John Maeda in his book The Laws of Simplicity talks about this, and says (simply!) that "some things can never be made simple." But many things can, and as Rob Tannen notes at Boxes and Arrows: This does not mean that things cannot be made simpler.

Given time (which means time left alone, and stop bothering me about those TPS reports) designers can often do a pretty good job with simplicity. So what's the problem? Why are S60 devices widely regarded as the opposite of simple? There isn't just one answer, of course, but a big one harks back to where I started: when you design for simplicity you aim at a particular collection of users. S60 has an astonishingly wide array of users, and while S60 devices may be marketed to them on the basis of fairly cohesive groups with a lot of similarity, they're not (yet) designed that way. You'll be able to immediately think of some ways each of these would be unique: a kids' browser, a university students' browser, a European professional's browser, an Indian entrepreneur's browser, an African health care worker's browser, and a Chinese urban dweller's browser. I can too, but even working at The Browsary we can't create all those products.

Not yet anyway. Once, the story goes, the Model T Ford was available in whatever color you wanted, as long as you wanted black. Today cars are nearly made to order; one car is likely to be quite different from another even while both are clearly identifiable as cars. I think the days of "idustrial-model" software -- one version for everybody, limited customization that you have to do yourself (and it's not simple!) -- are numbered. It's actually fairly curious that the industrial model came to be applied to software, where it (arguably) doesn't apply particularly well.

Want to call us and order a browser with the UI and features you like? I'd love to take that call and fill that order -- just wait a while; I have these TPS reports that need cover sheets...