The will to do better

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Think what you will about a certain recent entrant to the mobile arena, but they certainly don't lack cohones. "We’re the best, f*ck the rest" seems to be the general spirit. And if you look at what new inventions are cooking in Nokia Beta Labs, the folks up in Cupertino are not likely to think otherwise any time soon.

There is a lot of  bright people at Nokia. I have met a good few of them and they tend to be friendly and good-natured (although their sense of humor mainly manifests itself after midnight). I love them. But the thing that really cooks my noodle is: All those bright people, why do they push out crapware??

The latest offering is Conversation.

“Conversation is a messaging application that allows you to follow your conversations, organized by individual contacts. In addition, the application provides an easy way for replying to messages, and to continue the conversations”.

There is nothing wrong with it technically. It works. And why shouldn't it? Nokia has known how to send and receive SMS messages for close to 20 years. Organizing SMS messages by sender is also not new, I had this on my Nokia 3310 back around 1999 or so, if I remember correctly.

Poor user interface

What is the point of a chat interface for SMS? The advantage of a chat interface is that you can see the message that you are responding to and you stay in context during the chat.
The chat interface is basically an Instant Messaging application that uses SMS for message transport.
Conversation uses a standard list that is not suitable for this purpose. The list shows only the start of the message. The message text is a scrolling marquee text which is inappropriate for long messages. Reading and replying means pogo-sticking back and forth. The messages has icons that indicates incoming or outgoing but the icons seems to be switched around. A thumbnail of the sender would have been better. What about exploring other user interfaces than a standard list? This is a lazy mans solution. Where is the will to do better?

Lazy men at work

Why is Conversation a tab in the Contacts application? The conversations is not linked to the contacts in any way. You can't go to a contact and see the conversation you had with that person. I hate to think it is because of convenience – the Contacts app happens to have an expandable tab and the Messages app does not?
Application silos is a curse that is plaguing most smartphones but this seems random, there is no integration. Where is the will to do better?

No fun

What about using the front camera for thumbnails? What about letting people start chat rooms? What about having the conversations display on the idle screen? Where is the fun and silly stuff like sending a buzz (vibrate your chat buddy's phone), smileys or animations. Where is the will to do better?

What’s up with the “Whatever. It's good enough.” attitude?

The only explanation that I can come up with is that this is telltale of a structural or organizational issue. A bunch of engineers that are occupied with technical under-the-hood challenges, a bunch of middle managers that are occupied with internal politics, and no one present that is concerned with what a good user experience looks like.