Our delightful journey with this User Experience blog has now come to an end
as S60.com is gearing toward more customer-oriented content. Our mission was
to share our expertise and insights with you developers and in return learn
more from you. And that mission was a success – we all made it happen! Thank
YOU!

The blog team has loved every moment, as we hope you did as well. Looking
back, this has been a unique project. We were able to raise and discuss a
great variety of hot topics, including mobile Flash, users in different
cultures, different application areas and concepts and personalization, to
name a few. However, the biggest category was User in sight. That’s the
starting point to everything. For User Experience specialists, following
user needs and behaviour is a continuous undertaking.

So where to go next? Luckily, there are many excellent blogs and sites out there continuing the discussion we started. My recommendations include my friend Kelly’s great blog Gotomobile, Niko Nyman’s versatile blog and one particularly interesting UX site, by one of my favourite writers: Scott Berkun’s UX clinic. Check it out, and while you’re at it, post a link to your own favourite UX site in the comments!

One more look into the future of User Experience. I see an emerging and
maturing world full of diversity - and that world has no borders. The key
element of success in the UX field is seamlessness: the ability to combine
user research, interaction design and UI design into one natural
uninterrupted flow. That’s called evolution. It will not happen overnight,
it will not happen by itself. We will make it happen, together. If you want to learn more, just contact me.

So, I won’t bid you completely farewell, as we are not going away. Nope. For now, meet us at Forum Nokia - lots of new and interesting fresh stuff there (for example: “S60 Platform: Visualization and Graphic Design Guideline” will be published soon). Look for us where the users are, we’re always closer than you think!

And we’re just getting started.

On behalf of the whole blog team,
Risto@Idean

A couple of things came to my mind when exploring the voice commands in my new phone. It is relatively easy for a user to call someone by saying the person’s name, or to open an application using the voice commands. Unfortunately, voice commands cannot be used for opening any application or view - even though there are quite many alternatives available. Also, after a promising start, having opened an application using a voice command, a user cannot proceed much further using only voice. It would be handy, for example, to start the text message reader using voice command–but this may not be possible (I could not find a way, at least). And it would also be nice if the user could select a speech synthesizer speaking one’s mother tongue - at least Finnish messages sound quite funny with the English-speaking synthesizer.
So, while there are interesting voice-related features, they are not used to the extent they could be. Could the user, for example, activate a kind of “voice command profile” in which messages and other texts could be heard? To make it more fun for the user, different kinds of speech synthesizer voices could be offered for listening - maybe even with varying emotional tones. As for emotional expression via mobile, the nature of potential solutions is limited by just one’s imagination - as is illustrated by a monkey* developed at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory.

* The page works with Microsoft Internet Explorer.

This entry is not that S60-specific, but still something that deserves an entry on this very day: Helsinki City Transport, the public transportation organizer in Helsinki, Finland, updates its SMS-based ticket purchasing service today. Here’s an insight for you non-Finns out there how things are done over here.

A quick recap: in the service, you can send an SMS to a service number to instantly receive an SMS-ticket that is valid for one hour on Helsinki trams, subways and commuter trains. The service has been around for quite a while and the whole concept is absolutely brilliant: forget about standing in a queue or trying to find loose change for the ticket vending machine; simply send an SMS and be on your way.

But. Enter the usability problem.

Until today, what you had to do is send the following exact message to the service number: “A 641“. My first reaction was: “What? Why? Why not just the word ‘ticket’ or something?” The code was (is) very unintuitive and cryptic: very difficult to remember by the non-frequent user. What was it again? What does the code mean? Why a random string of numbers? Does it work without the space character? And - what was the service number again?

Granted, there are plenty of information posters and simplified instructions scattered around. But there never seems to be one where you need it. So - why not just the word “ticket” as the code? Or even several alternatives (”ticket”, “lippu”, biljett”) to cater for all official and common local languages?

The logic behind the cryptic code, A 641, is as follows: “A” stands for a certain ticket type, “64″ is an identifier specifying the country (Finland) and 1 means Helsinki. How logical and exact. Definately required an engineer. (By the way, I think there are no other ticket types you can purchase with the service - no current need for different codes.)

Now, the service update: as of today (in honor of the Car Free Day), instead of “A 641″, you just need to enter “A 1″. Shorter, easier - better, but not quite there yet. Still plenty of room for improvement. On the plus side - at least the old code still works together with the new one, and the five-digit service number did not change. (And even all variations ‘A 1′, ‘A1′ ‘a 1′ and ‘a1′ work now.)

Do you have a similar service in your home city? How does it work? And what could be the ideal solution?

Users often comment that they would like to have a good quality mobile phone camera. Usually taking photos is the only consideration…but what about other ways of using the camera?

In some situations the camera could help a user to “take notes”. A user could, for example, take a picture of a book cover that her friend recommended (to later look up further information) or capture the opening hours on a shop door. (These could possibly be stored separately from rest of the photos.)

If this does not seem terribly helpful, what about reading 2D barcodes using one’s phone camera? There has been some earlier discussion about this in Tommi’s S60 Application Blog. I tried generating and reading Semapedia tags, which is basically phone-readable barcodes that take you to Wikipedia pages.* Quick and easy.

A mobile user perhaps does not need to browse Wikipedia daily, but the idea could be applied to various everyday situations, e.g. being in a movie theater or video rental store and trying to decide which movie to see. It would be handy to read a barcode on a movie list or on a DVD cover and then instantly receive a link to the movie trailer. For some time, several friends have been waiting and hoping for a phone-readable barcode solution to pay their bills.

Other suggestions?

* Semapedia.org is a “non-profit community-driven project to bring the knowledge from Wikipedia to relevant places in physical space”.

Hi S60 enthusiasts! I’m Joonas, a fresh addition to the blog contributors. I’ll kick off with one of my favourite applications: Contacts aka Phone Book aka Address Book. The application is vital for me. It’s my vault of contacts, addresses, phone numbers and birthdays. It has replaced my memory. However, it’s not a particularly easy memory to use.

I have some 400-500 entries in my address book. I think that this is a reasonable number of entries, considering that the address book is my primary place to where I collect all of my contacts, addresses, favourite restaurants, service numbers etc.

I was browsing my address book one day, searching for one particular contact whose name and number I couldn’t quite remember at the time. While browsing, I found lots of other entries I had totally forgotten even to exist. Some of them I didn’t recall at all. I also found a couple of double entries - or that was what I first thought. When I examined the doubles more closely, I discovered that they were not doubles, but individuals who just had exactly the same name but different phone numbers, addresses, and so on. I was lost.

There is lots of detailed information you can add (while it is not as easy as it could be) to one entry: name, several different phone numbers, email addresses, street addresses, titles, company names, web addresses, even countries, birthdays, pictures and so on. Browsing these details is slow if you have to check lots of entries to find your target (left soft key to open the options menu, several clicks down to select details for more detailed information than first and last name).

Fortunately I remembered the missing name after some browsing and found the contact I was originally searching for. But what about when you don’t remember the names? You might remember his or her title, company or face? What then? That doesn’t help you much if you don’t remember where to search.

Someone might ask why I don’t use groups to sort my contacts. Good question. Groups might be a wonderful feature. However that feature lacks lots of actual functionalities to make it really wonderful. These are sorting and filtering. Dictionary.com defines the term group like this: a number of persons or things ranged or considered together as being related in some way. Assigning filters for groups would be one way to make those relations. It’s not the only way and there is still a need to set some of these relations manually (like it works now), but filtering and sorting should be there. However, browsing, filtering or sorting an address book is not easy. It is almost impossible if you don’t know the first or last name of your target. Correct me if I am wrong, but these two are the only options you can sort or search your contacts at the moment. Why can’t you use all the metadata you have entered for the entry to sort or organize your address book?

I think we might need a more sophisticated way to browse, sort and organize our contacts. Creating entries could also be easier, but that is a completely different story. Am I the only one who is lost in contacts?