S60 Open to new features

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

Being able to extend a phone with 3rd party applications is often seen as the key benefit of the S60 platform. It’s easy to understand why this characteristic has become so popular in marketing the S60: who would not want to have a phone that suits your needs and daily tasks even better?

From the user’s perspective there are, however, a couple of steps in the purchasing-installing-using process that make the utilization of these applications harder than it should be (this is based on my experiences as a researcher and user– and not on any particular research). These steps include:

1. Finding these applications seems to be quite hard for most of the potential users. The applications are just “out there” and only some people with special knowledge about technological things find their way there. Applications that an average user most probably finds are the ones on the Seiska's back cover (a gossip magazine in Finland).

2. When the user wants to change her phone, the problems begin: Will I be able to move these applications, themes etc. (that I have already payed for) to my new device? How can I do it? Where are the installation files? On my phone’s memory, on the memory stick, as a attachment in a message or have I deleted them?

I have met users who have simply accepted that they can’t utilize the applications they purchased because they don’t know if it’s possible or how they could do it if it were possible.

I think the following things could be done in order to enhance the User Experience of 3rd party applications:

1. Organizing and storing files should be more intuitive in S60. Most people store and organize files in folders, why could this not be the case with S60?

2. In each application there could be a built-in option like “Move this application to another device”.

Naturally there are ways to handle these issues (like the PC suite and File Manager), but it does not seem to be intuitive enough for an average 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 :)

When you spend time with S60 users, it becomes pretty obvious what drives the usage from an end-user’s point of view. Of course, things like design, ergonomics etc. have a strong influence but if we concentrate on every day usage, features that make usage more efficient are the ones that users are really looking for. These play a big role in high user satisfaction and desirable user experience. Based on my knowledge about S60 users, the following features are considered wonderful among the users: 1) menu key functionality; 2) copy-paste functions; 3) mark function; and 4) quick activation of silent mode. There are more, I’m sure, but these features are something extraordinary and increase user satisfaction a lot. Unfortunately, every S60 user is not familiar with these. Once most users learn about these, it will be hard to change the platform – with these you’re hooked on S60!

Jakob Nielsen writes: "One of usability's most hard-earned lessons is that 'you are not the user.' If you work on a development project, you're atypical by definition. Design to optimize the user experience for outsiders, not insiders…It's tempting to work on what's hot, but to make money, focus on the basics that customers value."

A common mistake when designing and creating devices is, as a developer, to rely on one’s own “intuition” about the how a device should work and feel. Are those involved in creating and developing the product, in this case the device, the most appropriate to say what the device should look like, how it should act, how it should react etc.? How often does this happen when user experience research and usability studies are based on "developer testing" as opposed to user testing?

What is your take on this? What do you think a developer’s role should be in this process? Am I wrong, do developers have better insight into what the user needs and wants?

The Ring Tone is probably the most noticeable part of the mobile device user interface since the user hears it for every incoming call. As this article from CNN suggests, one of the most successful business areas has been the sales of Ring Tones.

Back in piip-piip-pi-pi-piip days it was really hard for me to understand why Ring Tones were such a hit. Expensive, short and low quality - didn't sound like a good deal to me. Now as sound quality gets better and better it becomes more reasonable to buy a Ring Tone. Man, it still makes me wonder how one can buy a Ring Tone of a few seconds that costs an equivalent price of a full song, but luckily everything just doesn't need to make sense. And after a short brainstorming (today it is the First of May celebration in Finland, using brains isn't the most clever thing to do...;) it starts to make more sense. For me the success of Ring Tones emphasizes how mobile phones are actually a way for personal expression. From the beginning of the mobile revolution, personalization has hugely helped the development of cellular to leap forward, sometimes even more than the technology innovations. Remember those first Nokia color covers? Or what happened with the first camera phones? You took a picture and made it as wallpaper for your phone. And how about all these nice mobile phone charms?

Usability of Ring Tones is quite a hazy area. Most of them are not very recognizable but still it doesn't matter so much - what does matter is your emotional attachment to a particular Ring Tone. If you grew up with AC/DC, it's obvious that Thunderstruck will make your "cocktail party" effect work better than Mozart's Requiem. And vice versa. As it's important to keep Ring Tones usable - you can read many good ideas about how to create a cool S60 Ring Tone from this Ring Tone Guideline - it's even more important to make a user feel good. For example, my mother really started to use her phone after she realized that this new phone actually plays her favorite song every time it ring's (it was a part of my big "do-not-fear-the-mighty-phone"-campaign). And suddenly, all new calendars, to-do's and MMS's made sense to her. It's not about technological innovations, it's about breaking the barrier with human and technology. Ring Tones are one sophisticated way to make people feel safe with new stuff. Ring Tones give users experiences!

But still it feels weird, that if you want to make music that sells, you will have a better chance with Ring Tones than with any other form of music. Do I need to start to sell my synthesizer rig?

I was thinking about something this weekend, as I was trying to learn more about my S60 device—I am one of those users who is unwilling to read the User Guide unless I desperately need an answer or something is clearly not working. So I generally learn by playing around and/or other, more experienced users offer me tips.

What do you think about S60 users? Do you think that most of them purchase the phone because of all the features etc. that come with the S60 device, because the phone looks/is cool or because their friend recommended a phone that happened to be a S60 phone? I think the answer to this question has everything to do with how to develop S60 in the future.