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.