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.