S60 Open to new features

It is not an easy job to put together excellent user experience and even pass the expectations. I had a trip to San Francisco while ago. I got bunch of tickets and because I hadn’t traveled from Helsinki airport for ages, I wanted to check how much earlier I should be at the airport. There was nothing about this in the tickets or in a pocket where the tickets were delivered. I checked from Finnish aviation web pages, which informed me to check from the air company that I’m using. Then next destination would have been British Airways and find Helsinki airport information – aaargh, forget it. Better to check from Finnair what they recommend and use it as guidance, BA can’t be that different. It worked, I was ready to optimize wake up time and arrival to airport. Trouble just started from there, but telling all the details would be too long story.

In telecommunications we are not any better. Out of box experience talk has continued years but it’s not a easy job put all the pieces together when there are many companies involved to user experience. It should be every company’s interest to make it work, but nobody seems to have the total ownership. Roughly everything goes so that we develop the software, licensee integrates it to phone and phone goes to retail shop via operator or directly from manufacturer. S60 is a platform packed with features, but not all of them are available in all the networks, and even it they are, settings are not in place on the phone. Too often user opens the box, inserts the SIM card and only thing user can do is to make phone calls and send SMS. It’s a great achievement, but we have to remember that hundreds of engineers in Nokia have been developing other fancy features on the phone, so it really would be great if people could use those features. Otherwise that energy and work should have been used to more valuable things.

One nice usability trick is to hide features, which are not configured. Send via email option doesn’t appear in S60 Camera or Gallery application, if email is not configured. Unfortunately same logic doesn’t apply with video calls. If you want to initiate phone call from messaging application, you are being asked either it’s a voice or video call. First of all, most likely you are not thinking of making a video call, secondly you are very likely outside of 3G network, thirdly the receiver is out of 3G network and fourthly network you are using anyway doesn’t support video calls in any circumstances like my Sonera network in Finland.