S60 User Experience

June 01, 2006 Becoming an S60 user (Part 2) Posted by at 04:37 PM | Categories: S60 User

A friend of mine recently bought an N70 phone. Before that he had been using a Series 40 phone (although he did and does not know the difference between these two, he just refers to them as old/new, small/big and not so expensive/expensive).

After he had been using the phone for a while, I asked him how he liked the new device. He told me that he liked it very much (well, after he got it back from the repair --- the phone had broken right after he bought it): “It’s great - I have been making video calls. Me and Inkeri (his girlfriend) were in the bus and we were having a video call with my work mate. They have a baby and he showed me what the baby looks like. It was really cool.”. (Wendy: this seems like at least a few Finns ‘share’ also in the public transportation :D).

All in all he seemed to be happy with his phone, but there was one thing he wondered if I could help him with: “There is this button I have to press to get to the menu. Do you know if you could bring the menu somehow to the main screen like that you would have a direct access to it…if there was a setting for it or something?”

I had never heard a wish like that: the main menu right in the idle screen…I can’t even imagine how it would function. I answered to my friend that it is unfortunately not possible and he sounded a little disappointed. Even the active standby was not what he had wished for.

I think his wish was very interesting though. I guess it all comes down to the fact that the Series 40 users feel that the menu-button (at least in the beginning) is kind of an extra step to the menu. In theory there are no more steps in S60 than in the Series 40, but users seem to feel like there are. Why this is so is a bit unclear to me. One explanation could be that the menu-button is, on many phone models, located quite far away from the screen.

I’m sure this friend of mine will get used to the menu button (as I and many others did) --- or probably he already has. Maybe I need to call him and ask :)

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"I had never heard a wish like that: the main menu right in the idle screen…I can’t even imagine how it would function."

Well, iPod kind of has this type of structure. You have no idle screen but you start at the main menu instead. Not sure about S60 phones but I have a feeling that the idle screen of my phone could me used more efficiently.

When trying out my friends' S60 phones it has taken me some time before I've understood that I will have to press a special menu button to enter the menu. In the older Nokias you used to enter the menu by a soft key, anyway.

[BTW, there's a bug in the blog template: when I press tab having entered the security code the focus jums to the search box at the top of the page.]

Also compare the speed of bringup up the S60 menu vs. the Series 40 menu; on the S60 it is orders of magnitude slower if the Menu application is not already loaded into memory. To the user this speed difference would make it seem like the S60 one is much more complex and difficult to reach.

I feel the same way about our demo units (S60) vs. my personal S40 phone -- the menu button doesn't seem intuitive, just intrusive. There are two reasons from my perspective:

(1) the menu button on the 6680 is in the lower left corner of the keypag -- nowhere near the display. So mentally and visually, while I am trying to interact with the display, I have to interrupt and go looking for a button in an unrelated zone of the machine. (This is the same effect, for me, as plugging in a USB device into my laptop -- it requires a break in the flow of activity, and a visual search.) Contrast this with the S40 phone, where the softkey is just under -- and labeled within -- the display itself. A more integrated step, mentally.

(2) With an S60 phone, I have two primary mental usage modes: making/taking calls, and computing "stuff" (pictures, messages, other programs, whatever). Requiring a mode change to activate primary functions is irritating. With an S40 phone, I have a single primary usage mode: calls. Anything else (games, clocks) is an afterthought, so it doesn't bother me to take an extra step to get to those functions.

It's all a matter of perspective. By the way, it doesn't seem to make a difference to me how long I've used the phone. It isn't about "getting used to it". It's about mentally having to change gears.

PA: Good point. When I was talking to this fried of mine I was just thinking about the particular N70 UI and tried to figure out that what the UI would be like if the main menu was in the idle ---- like what kind of actions would be in the softkeys etc.

I guess "menu in the idle" would be possible, but probably you had to change the whole UI logic and not apply this just as a setting.

It's interesring to see what happens to the menu button --- will people "get used to it mentally" as Sarah wrote or will other alternatives be introduced?

S60 Open to new features

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