S60 Open to new features

Related to my previous entry, I'm thinking of ways of improving the everyday use of the S60 device, making it more efficient. We, as users, tend to do things the way we are used to, repeating the same patterns and routines again and again. This is quite natural and part in learning and memorizing how to use a complex environment designed to perform a huge number of different tasks (and S60 qualifies here!). These patterns may occur in the navigation ("Open menu, scroll down, enter folder, scroll, open application") or inside various applications.

Sometimes these patterns may feel natural, sometimes we don't even notice their existence - and sometimes they repeatedly annoy us ("Why haven't they come up with a better way to add a simple smiley to an SMS!").

In a perfect world, good design and extensive research makes the UI easy, intuitive and efficient to use from the very first release. Then there's the real world with all the time and resource constraints. However, application developers should have an open eye toward user feedback, always eager doing it a bit better next time.

Can you identify patterns in your everyday use, things you repeat that may not be the most efficient way of getting the task done? Why do you repeat them - because you don't know a better way? Or are you limited by the UI and the environment?

And, do you know how to work around the problem?

As Riitta and Maija already mentioned, there's a few fresh faces contributing to this blog - nice to meet you! My focus is on efficient use of the S60 device; cutting corners, finding alternative ways of performing tasks and generally taking the most out of the device. This focus may be due to my inherit laziness and desire to do things simply - or perhaps the slow and sunny Finnish summer is getting to me!

In my opinion, shortcuts and alternative paths are not for PowerUsers (TM) only. This is why they should not be secrets hidden under the OS hood. Regular users getting to know S60 should be encouraged to try out alternative ways of performing their everyday tasks; this makes them more at home with their device. And this has everything to do with User Experience.

Onto my topic today: do we need the S60 menu in our everyday use, or could we do completely without it?

Looking at my N70, I have a wealth of options I can do right from the main display. With a little customization, I can launch all the applications I need without opening the menu. Let's see the options I have:

- 2 softkeys
- 5 application shortcuts in the active standby (aka active idle) mode
- access to the calender from the active standby
- the multimedia key (long press to change the settings!)
- access to the call log with the green dial key
- ability to launch the browser with long press of 0

That's access up to 11 applications right there! Did I miss something? And, do you still have a reason to browse the menu in your everyday use?

Oh yeah - something I really like with the N70: the best (and simplest!) shortcut is behind the camera; simply slide the cover to launch the camera. That's so great!

As the popularity of different forms of messaging and digital self-expression prove, people like to share and show what they think and do. There is an increasing number of possibilities to use the text, image and video mediums with mobile devices for this purpose. However, starting to participate may require more than one or two steps before you get some results for you efforts: reading instructions, finding out if your phone model is suitable for doing things you want to do, downloading some software etc. At this point most “basic users” would probably decide to go and do something else or just stick to using PC.

An example of a solution that is relatively easy to approach from a "basic user" point of view, is GOFRESH’s teenager oriented “itsmy.com” mobile community:

It took but couple of minutes to create a simple mobile homepage (or a “nickpage” as they called it) following three instructions:

1. Take out your mobile phone!
2. Type into your mobile phone’s browser! http://mobile.itsmy.com
3. Click on “LOGIN/WELCOME” & create your personal NICKPAGE.

Through a small number of steps, the user is directed quite instantly to use her or his mobile device for participating in a community (as long as the mobile phone’s web connection is functioning). Even if this particular community would not be the ideal one in the end, the treshold for trying out other similar services and applications for mobile devices might be lowered after getting started with something. And if you think of teenagers growing up using such “nickpages”, they probably will not have any conceptual gap between expressing oneself via the mobile phone or via PC. Maybe there is a lesson to learn here :-) ?

As I mentioned in my last entry there is enormous potential to reach unparalleled end-user satisfaction with well-working and easy to use solutions which make our family life little easier. Last weekend I faced a real world use case once again. The family calendar is definitely the thing but the offering could be even more desirable with couple of features more. One of those is synchronization of Contacts. And now I really emphasize the word easy-to-use and don’t count on solutions based on MS Exchange, not yet!

It’s pretty irritating (as I found out) to try to make phone call with your family member’s phone, just to recognize that you don’t know the people in the contact list or the number of your lovely mother in law is missing; I know it could be intentional but… So is there possibility to have feature that allows you to have intelligent synchronization of your contacts? Of course, you should have possibility to specify the numbers you would like to share with others. Maybe we’re closing the moment when our phones will work as displays and show the content stored in data warehouses, hosted by operators for example, but meanwhile some solutions in this field could make our lives little easier, I hope!

Some of us are on their summer vacation, so the User Experience blog is slowing down a bit. But in the meanwhile, we introduce a couple of new authors. They are Tomi and Kati from Idean Research. You will learn more about them during the next few days.

The question is: How to manage your family schedules easily; one has music lesson other has football trainings and third would like to have car this evening. Ok, you can make the calls but still the coordination is very challenging. There you have a clear user need identified: Shared calendar and online synchronization of it. This is pretty famous use case (as we all know) but there is no appropriate solution available. In this case mobile device is the one who can make our lives little easier. But to make this idea fly he or she need some help from PC and home entertainment devices. These could work as a presentation centers at home. Also, the potential users are more used to manage the settings with computers and TV’s than mobile phones.

So the use case is very clear but the real challenge is to design UI’s for this need. Because the skills of the users will vary a lot, it’s essential to have solutions that are easy to use and understand; the affordance issues should also be taken seriously. However, if the challenges in UI design are solved, I’m sure that there will be masses of satisfied end-users. Most importantly people who are used to work with the well-working platform will not change it when the device is in the end of its life cycle. In this case the platform has a real chance to make the difference.