P1i user interface - is it any better?

I've finally had some time to spend it with SonyEricsson P1i, the avant-garde of "serious" SE smartphones. As I have previously confessed, their previous generation flagship product had been my device of choice for almost 3 years.
Must I say I had been quite excited and I had some expectations of increased usability, robustness and stability of the new runner-up P1i.
But it turned out, that the P1i device (again! after the lackluster P990i) is not up to pretty high usability/ergonomics standards that I had enjoyed on my trustworthy P910i.
And here's why.

1. First off, they left off the 5-way JogDial wheel.

This wheel alone is an "interface" on its own.
The whole menu structure in UIQ2.1 has been fully accessible with just your left thumb on jog dial!
You could open menus, close them, navigate within, select items, run them with only a thumb, single-handedly, even with the flip closed!



Now all that goodness is gone, since the P990...






2. They also left off the phone buttons.

P1i contains only qwerty keyboard, no "Answer"/"End Call" or other phone-related buttons.
What this means is that you have to use a mixed interface - you dial numbers on keyboard, then press on-screen "Call Button" (or press the jog dial inside). Switching from virtual keys for control, to physical buttons for numbers.

Sometimes the on-screen buttons are small and you need stylus... Needless to say - one hand/on-the-go operation becomes cumbersome. In P910i it was solved by a flip-closed mode, which beautifully shifted the complexity away, switching display sensors off while on-the-go. But here in P1i - another step back and dispersion of your attention.




3. The ubiquitous "More" button.

This is the most annoying and cumbersome feature of all UIQ3 user interface.
Whenever some application designers feel some "need of space" for all the menu features that don't fit into the 3 soft-buttons in the lower bar, they hide all the goodness into a single and impenetrable "More" button, behind which hell only knows how many useful (or completely not) features are hidden.
User often is compelled to press that button just to see what else that application can provide.

This is so inferior to the UIQ2 and MacOS paradigm of top-bar pull-down menus that I have nothing else to say. Just check the screenshots. This would have been OK for your dumb phones with buttons only, but on a touch-based smartphone! Duh.
How could hiding part of UI help user productivity and UI transparency I just can't imagine! I think we've been there already with Microsoft's "Personalized Menus".






4. The 3 ways of input.

User may interact with P1i using either:

-- keyboard,
-- side buttons and jog dial,
-- touchscreen+stylus,
-- touchscreen+fingers.

Having many options for control could sound as advantage, but those inputs methods are complementary throughout the UI, not replaceable!
For some features you HAVE to use on-screen soft-buttons, which are easiest and most conveniently pressed with just a finger; for others, such as very basic CLOSE button in the upper right, you better be holding a stylus since the button itself is quite small; for still others (CAMERA) there's no way but to press a side button.
This makes user experience tattered into pieces of using different input methods.
Especially funny when you see several "Close" buttons on the screen - one for the stylus (top right corner) and one for non-existing in P1i "three buttons row" (lower right)!

5. "Do you want 5, 15 or all of your apps?"

The paradigm of "More", "Even more" and "All" continues in the application strip at the bottom of the Home screen.








With touch screen, there could have been a better solution - a scrollable "infinite" ribbon of icons, with "inertia", like a wheel that would roll for some time after you clicked and dragged it. Such ribbon would effectively allow to do away with the application menu and the 12-icon mode. Customization would be accomodated by re-arranging icons order on the launch ribbon.
Instead, user sees 5 icons, by clicking on a divider a user can see 15 icons (with peculiar diamonds replacing empty spaces!) or, finally, the whole application menu.
Now what if I want space just for 7 or 19 icons? :)

6. The Ulimate Goal.

So what it is, the ultimate goal of such conformist UIQ3 UI design?

Compatibility with buttons-only phones.

And while I can agree that it serves them well (take MOTO RIZR Z8 for example), at the same time it denies the usability achievements of the past platform, UIQ2.1.
Such situation derails old-time users from UIQ and drives them in hordes to Windows Mobile in search of 'new cool' stuff and 'powerfull specs' stuff.
I have seen this situation en-masse in a well-known Russian online forum which used to be alive with the joyful sounds of P910i users, but not anymore. Most people left, only occasional newbies ask for a solution and some old-timers file their report on migration to Windows Mobile world. Some also express intent to migrate there since they did not like what they saw in UIQ3 devices from SonyEricsson either.

Would it not have been possible to create a separate, simpler version of UIQ, like Nokia S60's cousin, Series40?

'One size fits all' strategy failed, at least in the usability plane. And that means a lot nowadays.

What's most annoying is that SonyEricsson had 3 years since the P910i launch to improve and polish the highly valued hardware ergonomics and interface before iPhone hit the shelves! This very strategic blunder seems oh so familiar...

They were the closest shot to the "simplest stuff", the bread and butter of Apple Inc.
This may be also testified by the fact that Apple went as far to help SonyEricsson to write UIQ-based "iSync agent" for P910i, which installs on the phone the first time you try to sync it with a Mac. The sync support is full, up to the contacts pictures.

And yet SonyEricsson pursued some other goals [comments are welcome] and basically slipped down on the software, while mucking the hardware with a non-optional keyboard, and a shorter screen.
Yes, 3G, yes, WiFi, but why go away from marvels of past technology? Would you buy a PC with a faster WiFi but smaller screen and less convenient (and non-removable) keyboard and mouse?
I loved P910i and seeing SonyEricsson fall was a pain.

Such is my completely personal and biased old-timer SonyEricsson hardcore smartphone user opinion.

All comments with no offensive meaning will be published.

PC Suites revisited

Hello my patient reader,

In a previous blog entry "An Ideal PC Suite" I expressed my vision and hopes for a better PC Suite - and Nokia delivers! What I mostly wished for, is "smart auto-sync" feature, is at the core of the Nokia LifeBlog application!
If you never heard or tried the application, now's the best time to do so. Honestly, I believe this app has all the potential to become a key component of the upcoming Nokia Ovi stuff.
It lets you have and manage offline copy of your phone's content - all the MMS, SMS, photos and videos. On a horizontal "Time roll", easily scrollable!
LifeBlog-compatible phones stamp all new items with smart "location tags" that let you differentiate between cell network areas. You can later rename those tags - say, after city names - and with a simple click in LifeBlog you can see all items that were created in that same area! At the very rough, you automatically get a new location for every country you've been in while using the phone.
The LifeBlog UI "scrolls like butter"! It's a true "Nokia iLife", highly usable and very easy to learn. Amazingly enough, you may use it straight off the phone, no PC required! Capture and blog online, on-the-go.

There's more exciting news - there's now a new "Nokia Photos" application, delivered as part of N-series PC Suite 2.0
This one has also a very good UI and it allows you to import all your pre-existing photos from either a hard drive or a cell phone, should you want to use it as your photo organizer.
Nokia Photos has a Timeline View, which looks very much like the LifeBlog.
Here's one important thing to notice about those apps.

They do not require you to have a phone!!!

You can use them just as your digital life organizers.This strategy mirrors what Apple, Inc. has done to iTunes - you may use it without an iPod, just for ripping/storing/playing/burning your data.
Once you get used to a blissful user experience, you might as well start looking out for a compatible device, to streamline your "digital life management" experience even more ;)

Of course, these new applications allow you to upload the content to your blogs!

Those apps are essentially the Nokia i-Apps. If this is what Ovi will be like, I am all in!

The only strange thing is that those "web accounts" need to be set up independently in both programs.
Another small issue that I noticed is that LifeBlog does not correctly "play" animated GIFs in MMS. Such graphic files take single MMS slide, but this slide should not be still. On a phone they play fine.

Did you notice there are many Nokia PC Suites out there?
There are "normal" PC Suite, which work even with S40 devices (the moest recent version is 6.85). There are also E-series PC Suite (which I have not yet seen), the Vertu PC Suite, the PC Suite Express, and, most importantly, N-Series PC Suite (most recent version 2.0).

The battle of PC Suites continues!

I took part of a Nokia PC Suite Beta test for version 6.85.
Of the 3 errors I reported, none were fixed.

I still hope for the next version
I uninstalled 6.85 and downloaded another flavor of Nokia PC Suite , aka N-Series PC Suite. As the name suggests, this would work only with Nokia N-series smartphones.
It features a very slick black 'batman' design and cool in-focus transitions. It worked really well for me and never crashed once. It has less clutter on main page since the main page is broken into 4 categories: Music, Photo/Video, Internet, and Tools.



The good part about it is that it did away with kludgy Nokia Media Player which became almost dysfunctional in the latest 6.85 release. The media player of choice is now ... ta da!...the Microsoft Media Player 11 (which was not a hard choice on PC, I suspect).
Now there's hope for playability of stuff...
BUT (there must always be "but") - the N-series does not have the corresponding messaging part - you can not send SMS/MMS, there's no browser entry for your phone in Explorer anymore. Once they add the missing functionality, there's no turning back for me.
Meanwhile - I came up with another idea regarding PC Suite UI - why They have not changed the INTERFACE much, they changed the LOOK. IMHO the less of "interface" we have, the better. For instance, is there really a need for the main window since we have the same apps in the systray launcher?
Could not they have moved

"5 new messages"
"3 missed calls"

- notifications into the Windows system tray notification area?
You'd click there and see the messages and the Call Log.
Windows has the API just for that. I hardly foresee users keeping the main window open just to see the new SMS.

(6.85 rants)
The new and controversial (from usability standpoint) feature of 6.85 is the small messages pane in the lower left corner of the main window. In few seconds after start, it shows you the three most recent SMS (and only short parts of them).
You may click and close the pane, though.
This feature look like "blind innovation" and it brings only questions:

"Why only three?"
"Why only SMS (not e-mails)?"

If you'd get serious to read more behind those short excepts from SMS, you'd click into the area, and PC Suite would still bring you to the Messages entry in the windows Explorer. You'd have to click once more on the Inbox hive to see the message list. One more double-click and you finally see the whole message.
The fact that there's still no decent UI to the communicative core of the product is quite amazing.
Completely usable and convenient solutions is what we all need. They should take preference in development resources, not those ad-hoc, not-well-thought out, features, that look like they're there just to show off... Otherwise the product may fall down sick of 'featuritis'...I never wish this to happen to a Nokia product.

Microsoft Office:mac2008

Microsoft Office could be a target of a separate essay on how low one could go with usability when they not only try to cram more features, but also try to ADVERTISE them to user. Remember Clippy, the Office Assistant? That little "friend" apparently got so bad feedback from business-minded folks that they finally stopped advertizing it and switched it off by default. Now MS wants mac users to get ready to buy the upcoming Office:mac2008.
Simply have a look at their running ad: www.macoffice2008.com

Now let's see how many menus they present to a user:


1. The standard Mac OS menu in the top line on the screen.
2. The toolbar menu (with text labels) below the document title.
3. The "ribbon" menu top line of tabs.
4. The "ribbon" menu lower line of tabs.
5. The "ribbon" menu icons
6. The Formatting palette, floating.

This ribbon menu is the "New & Improved" stuff, and I think it's not done properly.
Just look at how all those menus took 1/3 of your screen, in vertical dimension!
I think it should've been made into a floating palette (MacOS X "drawer" UI concept comes to mind), since the ribbon menu is not needed all the time.
Or, at least, make the menu vertical, not horizontal.
The new DVD-aspect-ratio displays invite you to explore the width, not the height.
Had they made the ribbon menu a vertically floating palette, things would look much better and less cluttered.
To sum it up, current MS UI philosophy seems to be

"First - our Product, then - your Document".

They put the document you work on into a corner of what's left after their "new feature marketing" people put all those new shiny icons in the "prime space" which should be well reserved for your document.

They forget that [their] Tools are less important than [your] Trade.
Luckily to them, the Corporations world is deep entrenched in their legacy.
But as for the Personal world, it's high time to think of alternatives.
Apple's iWork package is something to be in terms of UI and usability, while maybe lacking more advanced features and complexity required in daily Corporate business.

iPhone user experience comments

iGot iPhone :)
And so I spent some time figuring out if there are some blunders in it's UI.
There were none. Good job Apple!
There are some functionalities missing, such as MMS or on-the-go media management, but I believe they are dropped by intent, to execute along a clear strategy.
Mac now is the digital hub. ("Oh, sorry PC, you too!")



The only obvious point I would improve is in the Mail client:
- if you happen to have many mailbox accounts (as you can see, I have three), you must go to each other Inbox separately, because the e-mail does not aggregate them into one place like Apple Mail on Mac does.
And so it takes 10 taps just to look into headers in all three mailboxes. This would be reduced to 2 taps if Apple chose to accept the Apple Mail's approach. Maybe this will be fixed soon, in the iPhone Firmware update 1.1.1.







<--- iPhone Mail









That's how Apple mail aggregates mailboxes --->


Another thing I noticed is that there's no task switcher aside from the Home Button, that would take you to the main program menu. Although this initially feels as a drawback, this way the user has only one way to start a program, and the icons are always fixed in the same places, which decreases time-to-launch for every program as the user becomes acquainted to their location on screen.


There are some 3rd party utilities that allow you to have alternative task switcher (SummerBoard). You press in the lower right corner and drag to the centre some analog of "Sun wheel" whith all the programs sitting on it's "rays". The further you drag, the bigger the icons. Moving along the circle selects the program icon.
There appears a separate button for lauching the selected application.
Quite innovative, but clunky and requires to use both hands for a faily basic task.



It happened so that Apple products had never had lack of style.
And this one is not an exception. The company has a track of setting trends for few industries already. All-in-one, translucent colors, USB, floppy-less, IEEE1394, OOP, media management and distribution, now cellphones...They are the true creative power, and have the guts to follow their vision, through the years.
To be competitive, just market share is not enough. One has to be as bold and creative as Apple, not just foresee the Future, but create it. And they made it.
Now the multi-touch UI is Present.

So if you are in UI field, or "just browsing", by all means check out this new level of usability.
I also welcome your comments.

An Ideal PC Suite for a cell phone

I've thought hard about different PC Suite products from all the major cell phone vendors, taking into consideration their usability and features.
I also tested them all in real situations.

"What's not right? What's there to add?"

So I finally came up with my own vision of a PC Suite product, and I will share it here.

I will not go into detailed comments on the current status-quo in this arena, instead let's envision how this is to be done.

Why use a PC Suite, before all?
I know many people who do not. Many of them stopped calling me, and then I phoned them only to find that they lost their phone WITH THEIR ADDRESS BOOK!
Omitting unwise comment on their unwise behaviour, isn't there something that does not welcome them to go ahead and install a PC Suite?
Oh wait, then I found out that many of them HAD their PC suite installed!
So what happened? They forgot to sync regularly enough.

This brings in a Point1 - an Ideal PC Suite must auto-sync smartly.

Sony Ericsson's product lets you set an option to sync each time you put your phone into cradle. What's wrong? The quality of sync and the fault protection.
It's simply not resilient to failures (you take the phone off the cradle while it syncs and you're up to big problem).

So - what is this "smart auto-sync"?
To me, it's when you "set it & forget it". Think of how Outlook(tm) smartly syncs to your Exchange server at work.

You get home, you're offline, and - here's your mail.
This very fucntionality should be at the core of a modern communication product.
You lose your phone - and here are your SMS, MMS, phonebook, media, bookmarks, e-mails, other files, applications. All at your PC.
Right now this is done quite clumsily by either a full backup (takes quite some time, requires launching an app, cannot be done smartly with no user intervention), or by the Syncronise function - this one does not save your media, nor your document files, nor Messages, nor applications, and the feature also must be launched as a separate app.
Think of how Outlook(tm) DOES NOT require you to press "Get New Mail" button each time you want to see new mail.
Right now user has to operate the product all the time...
The answer to this clumsiness - replace the current UI and function with more "daemon-like", "service" behaviour, when you select once - which data you want to have synced to your PC, and the daemon "does the right thing".
You come home - the home PC sees your phone via BlueTooth, connects to it and syncs all your Messages, Contacts, Bookmarks and (if you chose so) - Media, Documents, Application settings. With you touching no buttons. Of course, you might be given a chance to know this is happening - by means of a slight "beep" on your phone.
What you would see on a PC is a rolling wheel somewhere in the System Tray.

So here's the chance to make an even better experience than what's provided by Apple, Inc. and it's products:
iPod can be set to synced when you plug it in.
But cell phones have BlueTooth! The don't even need to be plugged in, so there could be one step less! This would allow for an exquisitely simple user experience.

"Just bring it home!" and voila - you're covered with the newest gen of PC Suite.
Go lose you phone - and keep all the data.
Leave your PC Suite Backup function and all the waiting for fanatics and geeks who like to tinker-shminker with software.
The newest PC Suite would first ask you what to "cover" in the auto-backup cycles when you run the software installation process (right after the device pairing), and then - you might as well forget it's there, but you'll remember and you'll be glad you set everything right (again - smart setup defaults) when you come home crying over a lost or broken cell phone.

And sync the Contact Pictures to Outlook, both ways, already!
Right now the only positive experience I've had of preserving the contact pictures is using iSync on a Mac with SE P910i. Everything else sucks. I'm sorry but it does.
No wonder people rarely use pictures in contacts, it's so easy to lose them.
Apple even wrote an iSync Agent for P910i!

Speaking NOKIA formulas, Backup+Sync+Store Images=AutoSync.
Two icons less, a sea of usefulness more.

So much for a Backup, there are other parts of functionality, like Messaging and Contacts.
What's wrong? Point2 - No offline mode. Unless you sync, you only see Messages and Contacts when you have the phone connected. Yes, this setup allows you to have many phones connected and managed independently, but why no offline mode?
Think of how Outlook would allow you to have offline access to many separate mailboxes and Contacts.
The messaging interface has to be very email-like, with all the usual New, Reply, Forward buttons in their places, so that people find it really convenient to start and use it. On the left - the usual Folder list, with folders like SMS, MMS, Sent, Outbox. Drafts. Integrated with MMS studio, so that when you press New - MMS, you have a chance to select a template, or Insert Objects, or Record Objects on-the-go.

Offtopic: I have heard that a Fly mobile SX210 supports USB webcam mode in the firmware - that's a cool improvement, others might like to follow.

In NOKIA PC Suite the Messages in built into Phone Browser, I think this is a very dubious design solution. Users just don't expect to write e-mails or messages when they go browsing files. Give them a CommCenter, that looks and feels like an e-mail app, and accessible in offline mode.

So what's left? The Internet Connection?
Honestly, I think it should be done without a separate client software, there's no UI needed beside the normal OS UI for a modem connection.
But the reality is - you need proper drivers, init strings and CellOP-specific APN settings. Those are very nicely covered by NOKIA PC Suite Internet Connect applet.
To eliminate the need for it - that would take quite some innovation in cellular operator business.
There could be such phone modem drivers that would be able to read APNs off the phone, transfer their titles to PC and from there (in an Ideal PC Suite) you would just select which APN you want to use for PC->phone->internet access.
MMS messaging would be seamlessly blended into e-mail, with support for HTML-MMS conversion. All accessible from the same single CommCenter window.

Interfaces usability significantly drops if similar parts of functionality are accessibly from separate windows. The common and well-tested approach to this is using "tabs" by the edge of a single window.
With their new initiative NOKIA tries to renew their current S60 UI lineup, by replacing legacy "mesh" design menu with "panes" menu, giving up some screen real estate. This gives user a real "2-D" feel, because the two direction of the 5-way joystick are used complementary to each other. This is a step in the right direction, but only one of the many steps required to rev up the aged S60 UI to be competitive in modern market.

Why don't I shave with a RAZR?

I did another wild thing and swapped cell phones with my girlfriend for a week. Or two.


And here's my MOTOROLA RAZR UI analysis.

Here I go again, focusing only on points which could be improved, given due attention to detail and a good sense of usability.

May I call it my "6 steps to make RAZR sharper" guide? :)

Point 1. Right-to-Left.

Okay, this is very obvious for everybody. MOTO sticks to its tradition (against everybody else) of putting affirmative buttons on the right, negative action button on the left. It would have been memorizable, had they also chose to reverse the red&green call buttons. But they had not! So to Accept a Call, bear to left. But to Accept an Action, bear to the opposite side :)

Point 2. Scrolling.

MOTO has it's own way of fast scrolling. You do it by pressing numbers! So 1-2-3-ish, from early 80s era! Yes, you need to estimate on the numbers of lines you don't even see!
Or else - press'n'hold'n'wait while watching the lines slowly click by, along with the precious seconds of your life.
A simple scroll acceleration after a certain amount of press time would be so much better!

Point 3. Personal Tones.

If you set a personal call tone, say, for a friend, you also get it for the SMS from the friend.

So, setting and mp3 tune gives you whole lotta noiz at SMS arrival! Fun fun fun!

(Some SMS are sent at night, not to disturb with a call and a ring. Or across timezones.)

Point 4. Your e-mail is too long and will be deleted.

I know it sounds funny but it's not so when you wait for an important e-mail, and you finally get it, and you see:

Looks like some arhitecture limitation?

Point 5. Bleeps and moans.

The phone uses sound signals profusely.

It will not let you ignore an unread message, unanswered call, low battery.

You're better off fix it now or switch off sound.

There should have been an option to turn off such signals, akin to Service Jingle and others, that are controlled in Settings - Network.

Point 6. No repeated alarms.

You may set the alarms only as 1-time events.

Minor things:

There's a menu called Initial Settings. Hmm? Sounds like a place you only go once you turn it on the very first time. The right wording would be Basic Settings. Anyway, the only way to set up text entry modes is when you go to a place where you can enter some text and there you may invoke a context menu with Entry Mode and Entry Setup.

Oh, and don't forget! Your settings may change depending on the text field settings -try to go to e-mail setup and you'll see that now dot is not where it was, but @ ate it's lunch.

Themes are not in Settings - Phone, but are in Multimedia menu.

Okay, maybe 2 weeks was not enough to adapt myself? My answer is - the phone has to be supportive, not distractive.

All-in-all, I think this phone has rather impressive and solid UI, it is totally less cumbersome than on smartphones - and here we get to the point - either MOTO pays more attention or ... the phone is plainly simpler than the smartphones.

Whichever you think matters more in the case?

Another "wild" idea

Feeling unsafe out in the street?

Need additional protection against intruders?

Don't have a gun but like to surprise people?

Your cellphone might have you covered!

My idea is quite shocking - to built an electric shocker into a cellphone.

The back cover would be made of metal, connected to a circuit that would prevent accidental activation against your own ear! :) There are serious radio part compatibility implications, of course.

Otherwise we could have seen it already, I guess. :)

Pardon the crudeness of the idea, but it could really be helpful... say, for women :)

Wildcard Caller ID idea

Hi Experts,
I'm back with an idea of a little neat feature for Symbian (and possibly others) cell phones.
The idea is simple - to make user's life easier by recognizing (via Caller ID) groups of numbers matching a wildcard, not just the whole exact number of a Contact. Let me show you how.
You have Contacts in your cellphone's Address book. The phone matches the incoming CLI (Caller Line ID) of the caller to a number in the Contacts. But what if you want to identify a group of numbers?
This could be useful, for instance, to quickly see from which network (or city) you are being called, or from which company. It's no secret that many companies get pools of consecutive telephone numbers, so you could be quickly seeing from which company you get the call even without filling your Address Book with all employees' numbers.
Business customers may be interested in this feature. It would be a beneficial, value-adding feature for a platform, and a marketing differentiator, to provide a new type of contacts in the phone's address book - a template (wildcard) contact.

Usage example 1: Let's say I have the following entries:
+74955556666 Lena (BeeLine), +16457236546 John, +791687458755 Lena (MTS).

What if I could enter Address Book records like
+7916* MTS, +1* USA, +7903* BeeLine, +749512388## Forbes, +7812* St.Petersburg ?

Like in UNIX wildcards,
* (star) stands here for any number of any digits, # (mesh) stands for any single digit.

Usage Example 2:

I was 'phone-abused' by a real estate agency in Moscow - they have lots of employees in many offices, calling in from their office phones, all from the same pool +7495363####. I wasted lots of time answering their calls, telling them I "wrong number" and so on. They seem to have had wrong number of a client written down. Had I had this template contacts feature in my phone, I would have not need to squinch my eyes trying to see first digits and decide if I need to pick up.

Usage Example 3.

When late at night someone calls you from abroad on an important mission, it would be nice to see it's from another country (a word "Germany" shown) instead of trying to wake up and see if the first digits are +49.

Sounds good? Might be even better! (options)

"Exact match" means the current way of doing things - all numbers match.
"Wildcard match" means the new, group match.

A cellphone shows not only the exact match, but also the next worst match from a wildcard entries. And it could even highlight the part of incoming number that matches a wildcard, with a different color!

This gives a user, at a quick glance, a good idea of who might call, or where from, without the annoying deciphering of the caller ID by himself. If there's no exact match, the call history shows just the full number. If there's an exact match, and a worse match, the call history logs the 2 longest matches. 

Please tell me what you think.

6 steps to improve UIQ usability

Hello again,
I am back with some notes on how to improve SonyEricsson's UIQ user interface.
The UIQ is a great platform. To help make it even greater, in this blog I am focusing only on deficiencies in the usability, and show ways to fix them.
As a reference point let me use SonyEricsson P910i. I know, I know. Not the latest & greatest, but I think the most convenient and stable of the currect P-series smartphones. 5-way jog-dial and detachable keyboard seem to me quite hard to give up.
I have used P910i for 3 years. I really liked it, before I got N95.
I will be doing a new analysis on P1i once I get my hands on it.

Point 1. No Task Switcher.
There's no quick and easy way of switching from one running program to another. You have to go back to Applications menu, and reselect the application, as if you want to relaunch it. Install another 10-30 applications and you have to scroll a lot, just to switch tasks. Yes, there are 3rd party task switchers that allow you to close apps and switch between them.
SMan is free, but cumbersome, Magic Task Launcher is the best but it is not free.
Why not make such basic tool a UIQ feature?


Point 2. No "Send a Message" in the Call Log menu.
Go to the Call Log, and select an entry. There's no easy way to send a message to that person. There's no Send SMS nor Send MMS in the menus.
Even better would be to have clickable buttons, like the ones in the Address book.


The workaround it to go to Edit - Copy Number, then go to Messages - New SMS - and paste the number.
How cumbersome!


Point 3. Not easy to scroll to top and to bottom.
OK, this one is minor, but with a large number of items (I used to have 1100 SMS) it is really hard to get to bottom of the list. You open an application, the item list is at the top, and there's no way to reverse the sort order.
All there is to do is press the small "page down" button (depicted) and hold it, until you get to the bottom. This could take some time.
Why not save user's time by placing two small buttons more (Top/Bottom), above and below the PgUp/PgDn buttons?

Point 4. "Jots" are sorted in wrong order.
This one is related to inability to quickly go to bottom (previous point).

It is perfectly within human nature to use recent data more often than old (possibly obsolete) data. It's hard for me to realize why developers decided to put recent jots to the less accessible bottom of the list. I used to have 200 notes in my Jotter, so getting to the last one took me quite some effort.
A stack organization of jotter would have been just perfect.
I just screams for reversal of the sort order.


Point 5. Crappy browser.
The built-in browser is now mostly dysfunctional.
It mainly supports cHTML and WAP sites, most pages load forever, it often crashes the phone with a white screen, or hangs, or just refuses to load pages.
The picture on the right shows the phone's default pre-set Start Page at SonyEricsson. It used to be accessible 2 years ago :)
Luckily for all, there's the saviour - Opera Mini v2.
It allows for full-screen view, saves your traffic, does it with style and animation and the web images quality is great.
They dropped support for fullscreen view in v3 so I stayed at v2. No big deal.

Point 6. No alarms in power-off mode.
Unlike NOKIA platforms, UIQ does not wake up from power-off to ring you an alarm in the morning.
I don't know if it's a hardware or a software limitation, but certainly a setback in total product usability.

That was my 3rd review of "unusabilities" in major cellphone platforms.

Stay tuned for more!

6 steps to improve NOKIA S60 UI

Hello pundits,
today I continue the "UI improvement ideas" series and today our guest is.../drumroll/...
NOKIA S60 platform, as captured in it's N95-1 incarnation (f/w 11.0.026).
For the purpose of this review, I was using only default settings, and it's worth to note that some of my points could be alleviated by changing the defaults. But changing them could be even a tougher task.

Here's the brief: yes, the S60 is more complex than S40, and so it's less intuitive.
But it gives you whole lot'o'features!
Anything on Earth in mobile smartphone arena - you can have it.
The price? You must subdue to arcane logic of it's user interface.
Get used to it or get lost.

Here I will focus on how this UI makes you focus more on what you want, instead of trying to get out of your way.

Point 1. Bag of buttons. Think hard before you pick one.
I am not against buttons per se, just let me show you how confusing they can be.
The three most-used features of a phone are
a) call register,
b) contacts book and
c) SMS messages.

With S60, you have to think hard which button you press for doing those tasks, the phone buttons are all close to each other, and on the same left side by default.
It makes it difficult to pick the right button for the task, without a considerate and significant focus on what you're trying to accomplish. Thus, it all makes UI less intuitive and more cumbersome for everybody but the S60 fans or long-term users.

Ex. 1. Let's go to Contacts.
Unlock the phone. By default, the Contacts label is selected in the shortcuts strip near the top of the screen. Looking at the top of the screen and knowing (from many mobile phone UIs) that the right-side button [usually] Exits, and the left-side button [usually] Opens, I click the left button and... go to Calculator instead. That's because I was not attentive enough to look at the bottom of the screen. Of course, my fault. But what if I am in the street? Or in a car? For sure, I need my attention for other things. So how can I have my attention also in two places of the screen? Only by getting used to S60. But that's counter-intuitive.

Ex.2. Call register on-the-go.
Imagine you are walking the street or driving a car.
You remember you promised to call back, while you were busy in another conversiation.
You take the phone, unlock it, and looking at the screen, it's not easy to understand how to go to the call register. There's no icon for it. You have to remember to press the green call button.
So here we get to the next

Point 2. Which calls you want? [think harder]
The call register is split into 3 parts - Dialled numbers, Received calls, and Missed calls.
In your mind, you have the name of a person, not the type of call. So now one more time to think harder and remember your recent history of communication with that person.
Or else - flip through all three logs, one by one, looking for that person's name.
A much better call register would have all calls in one list, with appropriate call type icon beside each entry. But that would be so UIQ-like...
Oh wait! You still can do this UIQ-like trick in S60! But what it takes?
Go to Menu - Applications - Log. Click Right button.
You will see all call activities, including packet data, SMS, MMS and WLAN access.
Of course, you can set the shortcut to Log on either the standby labels or to one of the soft-button.
And I like that flexibility.
But how many users notice and actuallty do that, instead of routinely hacking through the default setup of the interface?

Point 3bis. "No files".
Put some music files onto phone. Take some pictures.
Now, imagine you have taken some really nice pictures, and a lot of them.
Close all applications. Start the Gallery - Images & Video.
Right after the application start, it shows "(no images or videos)" on screen!
That's when the heart breaks. The more pictures you have, the longer your face grows while you try to understand where the stuff went. That's because the application scans the memory for files. If the progress takes some time, a progress bar says "Opening" but this is understood as "opening the application", not as "yet scanning for your files".
And you could still see the scary message in background.
Why not put another message, say, "(scanning)"? The same behaviour goes on in the Music player while it scans for tracks.


Point 4. Not every program born equal. [So dig around before you find the right place, or use your memory]
Let's install some 3rd party programs into the phone.
Let's count now how many clicks you need to get to one of them (phone unlocked).
Click1 - the Menu button. Two more "Up" clicks to select Application item.
Centre click to Open. Now you have the Nokia apps at the top, so you have to scroll.
OK, the fastest way to scroll is Up. And the final click to Open the app.
Total=6 clicks as bare minimum for a 3rd party app with no pre-set shortcut.

Here's the same feat in UIQ2.1 - (flip open).
Scroll by using the jog-dial until you select the app. Click the jog-dial inside.

Here's the same feat in iPhone (unlocked).
Press the icon of the app.

Point 5. Locked away from a user.
Imagine you use your phone at your work desk.
You leave it on the table, so there's no need to lock the keypad.
But also, there's no way for the phone to know that.
Now, you put in a charger cable in.
This is one way for the phone to know that a keypad lock is not needed.
USB connection is another way.
The lock is needed only when the phone is being carried, right? It was designed to prevent accidental dials and keypresses when on-the-go.
Now, there are 2 cables in the phone (it is hardly being on-the-go) and it still locks the keypad!
No way I need that behaviour.

Ex.1. Four clicks to see new SMS or use USB cable.
Every time I get an SMS I need to do 4 button clicks instead of just one!
2 clicks to Unlock, one more to make the unlock message go away (which is another botherance, since I prefer to get a message only when there's something that needs my aditional attention), and one final click to show me the SMS. Quite annoying.
The same "locked nature" of S60 show itself when you want to use USB cable to sync it, or transfer music, or print images, or use it as a flash disk.
You connect a USB cable and the phone recognizes it, and asks you to choose one of four options - PC Suite, Mass storage, Image print or Media transfer.
But the phone does not unlock itself!
Quite contradictory behaviour.

Point 6. Kid's e-mail.
This one is pretty simple. The e-mail client does not support HTML.
Not to say of animated GIFs inline and such.
EDIT: You may still see the Attachment.html in the Web browser, though, but it requires 3 extra clicks per message.
So I'm adding Point 6bis for a balance-
There's no visual clue to how much progress the battery charging process made.
It could be 4 minutes left to full charge or 44 minutes - there's no way to tell.

This concludes my short review of NOKIA's newest mobile phone user interface, commonly known as S60 v3 FP1.

Watch this space for our next "guest"... from SonyEricsson!

NOKIA S40 user interface comments

With this post I begin a review of all major cellular phone's user interfaces - NOKIA's S40, S60, S80, S90, and SonyEriccson's UIQ2.1, UIQ3.

I will start with the most mature (being the oldest of all) mobile platform UI - NOKIA S40.

It is used in most phone models manufactured by NOKIA. In my review I used NOKIA 6170, not the newest but the neatest (to me) of them all.
http://europe.nokia.com/A4144202

These ideas should help developers to focus attention to details and continuity of user experience, thus enabling more competition for consumer mindshare to products of companies with a history of better attention to user interfaces and software interface design (Apple Inc. being major example).

So here's my "6 steps recipe" to improve S40 UI:
Let's start with the main piece of UI - Menu. Press the centre button of the joystick. Now what we see is many items, and the label of the centre button has changed to Select.

1. Incorrect! We do not select items here to perform an operation in second step (this is PC desktop metaphor). A proper name would be Open. This is what this button does - opens an application or a lower-level menu. We select what we intent to open by using the cursor buttons.



2. Now let's go to Settings. Here we see the most confusing part (and I have just seen again an engineer trying to make his way here) - three ambiguos items - Configurations, Phone, and Call Settings.
Very confusing! "Phone"? All I have in my hand is Phone. What else? I may just as well go there directly without thinking. Hence - this submenu needs to be eliminated completely, and it's content disseminated into others. Maybe, call it Personal, and place Shortcuts, Main & Mini Display inside? Settings - Configurations? Hmm... Now that I know what it is. It's Access Points, that's the name for it, and why not move it where it belongs, to the Settings - Connectivity submenu, along with Infrared and Bluetooth?

A usage example from life - "I want to change Configuration of Phone Calls. Which of the 3 items should I Open? :)"

3. While we're still here, Enhancements (please see the word definition at http://webster.com/)- a strange name for Accessories.




4. Now on to Scrolling. Open some Contacts, or Messages window with a lot of items. Start to scroll down. And as you cross the "invisible border" between the last item and the first item, there's no visual clue except for the item number in the upper-right side of the screen. But rarely any user keeps an eye on it, simply because the attention is on the items themselves! The cursor does not jump from bottom to top to indicate the "end of file" situation. Why not? The same goes with the reverse scrolling...



5. The first thing a user does to new phone is set it's Date & Time. Luckily, it's done automatically the first time. But if you later want to change it, you're up for a S40 surprise. A logical place to go would be Settings menu. But no, in fact it's [hidden] in the Organizer. (I take it back - it's not so on all phone firmware versions)



6. Wizards. Now, I'm not being a pro-Microsoft fan, but there's some sense in them using Wizards in Windows almost abusively. In S40, if I go to some application that does not have settings (like E-Mail), it just throws me back with an error message, instead of nicely taking me to a Wizard that would let me set all missing settings, step-by-step.



This concludes my brief analysis of S40 UI.

And while I admire the S40 as a mobile platform (ever-stable, works like TV) - compact, robust, fast and nice design of the 6170 phone, but it think there's still a lot to be done to improve the average user experience. And I showed you - how.

While this review shows only what the manfacturer might call "minor" issues, it is clearly instrumental in showing how all those issues add up to confuse the user experience.

Hardware Categories (Classes)

Let me share with you my vision of Hardware Categories.
To start with, it came to me once, that the rest of the [non-geekish] world has some pain determinig what can be done with a specific piece of IT hardware and what could not.

"Scanners, printers, faxes" may be easy to understand by the word of it, but "hard drives"?
"Flash" memory? RAM? CPU? GPU? NIC?
Multifunction copiers with secure printing and storage?
Heck, even that bluetooth spy stone for MI6 spy info exchange they found in Moscow http://www.bellona.org/english_import_area/international/russia/envirorights/info_access/41703

All those geek names are a hindrance for plain consumers.
And this only makes it hard for them to consume...
So what if we (the Industry) solve this problem by clearly categorizing all the existing hardware SKUs and put them into one or many categories,
clearly and unambiguosly indicating what that hardware does to the information flow?

I suggest they would go like these:
A - for Accumulating info
D - for Displaying info (making info sensible to us humans)
P - for Processing (modifying, encrypting, computing) info
S - for Sensing info (making it available to the hardware)
T - for Transferring info.

Let me show you some examples.
So, the whole PC does ADPST.
Printers do D (belongs to "D" hardware class).
Network card, routers do T.
Scanners do S.
Cryptocards, CPUs, FPUs do P.
Copiers do SD.
Faxes do SDT.
Telephones do T (belong to "T" hardware class).
Multifunction copiers with ability to store jobs on hard drive, send faxes and print do ADST.
Now, in order to see what you can do with a new device that is being marketed now, all you have to do is see it's hardware class descriptor.
Doesn't this make life easier?

Tell me what do you think.