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

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.

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.

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".

Maybe what people really want from the much-hyped convergence is everyday items that really cross the boundaries of conventional product development thinking. The owner of this oven was very delighted when he found the product. The designers of the product have understood what kind of usage patterns there are in many kitches. People listen to radio while cooking or eating. So, let's offer them a radio in a space-saving way!

One of the things I personally look forward to is the continuation of the location-based services boom. As the writings on the wall suggest, device manufacturers are taking steps toward increasing the focus of location services - perhaps the time of having integrated GPS/Galileo-capable devices from major manufacturers is sooner than we think!

New technology brings new concepts and killer applications. With something as revolutionary as location data, there are plenty of innovative applications out there, waiting to be discovered.

Example. Being an enthustiastic photographer, I just love the idea of combining digital photos with geotagging (basically, adding location metadata to the image - technically quite simple). So, a few years from now, when look on my collection of thousands (and thousands) of unorganized digital images, I can smile and enter queries such as: "Organize the images according to the city where the picture was taken" or even "show me all the pics I've taken in Europe, excluding that awful trip to Manchester in 2002". So simple, so effective.

What could the next mobile big hit be?

One possible solution is to create a more “active” interface. Take again the clock example: What if the clock were an icon to which the user could move the cursor and select the clock? Then the user, without leaving the primary screen, could set her alarm, check her various World clocks etc. And, even better, the user can replace the Clock application on the Active standby application list with another application he uses regularly!

Unfortunately, the whole theme – to have my device interact with the mail server – is too challenging for basic users, which is shame; with well working and easy-to-use features (should be close to plug and play ideology) platforms can create a real value to their users. This case, once again, raises big questions: how free is the information and is it possible for everyone to have internet on their mobiles? As I mentioned in my previous entry, there are big challenges that we’re facing on the road to a fully working mobile internet – just start with the issues like security and information overload. However, these challenges are not impossible to overcome. If we can make the technology work for us and not the other way around, I’m sure that we will witness a true revolution of mobility.

So what does this mean for the end user? Installing several applications onto a user's phone may lead to major usability problems later. Does this mean that the user can only install one application at a time? Is the user forced to find out how to work 2 or more applications that require the same shortcut command? This experience needs to be an intuitive one: a user finds an application that appears useful to her, she installs it, she uses it. Because she has a good experience, she goes to find another application; she installs it, and she----doesn't use it, she cannot use it because she can only use that shortcut command to start one application. Is this right?

A company did an experiment: they bought a number of smart phones from eBay, and checked if they can retrieve personal information from the devices (see their news bulletin).

And they succeeded.

Bank accounts and passwords. Business plans. Personal messages. Calenders. Contacts. And then some. Some of the devices were re-set to factory settings before they were sold second hand, as described in the user's manual. But it was still possible to dig up the personal information. The same kinds of cases have been reported on computer hard drives for years. This may be both a software and a hardware issue, but nevertheless - it's an issue that must be considered.

Fact is: user's invest real money in the devices. When moving on to a new model, they want to sell the old device or give it to a friend or a relative. They should be able to feel secure to pass the device on: how many of you would feel good in buying a new device of the same brand if you just heard your nerdy nephew was able to dig up everything you thought you just deleted?

There must be a better method of "just being sure" than tossing the device to the microwave oven for a few minutes!

I know I may sound repetitive but am I missing something? Is there an alternative to a mobile phone call to the 411 directory, which produces immediate and useful results? Could users send an SMS to a 411 number and receive similar (and fast) information? In a day and age when we don’t necessarily want to waste the time talking to another person (like an operator, or our mothers if the 411 call does not produce results), there ought to be an alternative. Perhaps the problem for users is that most alternatives are too slow, e.g. Internet access via one’s mobile device, or not informative enough.

I've been playing around with some different applications recently. I successfully downloaded a HandyKeylock application for the N70 phones. The application was placed in "My Own" folder. I went there and "opened" the file. Nothing happened, except that the screen blinked once and went back to the menu (with the selection still on the HandyKeylock application). Now that I cannot get it to work, I want to delete the file (some of you may ask why, but this is an issue for a psychiatrist!). Is there an easy way to delete applications after you've installed them on your phone? There should be and there better be...but if it is not obvious to me, I don't think it will be so obvious to other users who are even less experienced. The fact is, I would not have wanted to delete the application if it had been more intuitive to use. Nonetheless, the options like "delete" ought to be readily and easily available.