Sender 11

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.

iPhone: From one Walled Garden to another?

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... :-)

This may be heresy, but I believe that if Dickens were alive today, he would not have written about the French Revolution, he would have written about the mobile operators. The end of the thousand-year rule of kings in the mobile sector and the passing of power down to us, the common touch tone dialers.

But it does not seem like Steve Jobs gets to play the part of Napoleon Bonaparte any time soon. Steve Jobs claims that iPhone will “reinvent” the telecommunications sector. Eh? It is a closed device running on a closed network sold through exclusive (closed) distributorship. Doesn't sound like progress to me.

The iPhone is on its way to Europe. Why would European consumers want this type of "reinvention"? This is a fairly typical situation today:

• There is no network limitation on what kind of services I may choose.
• My phone is an open device, I can install anything I want. No limitations.
• I have full number portability and I can change to any operator anytime. (OK, it takes 4 days.)

Do customers want to pay a premium for the iPhone if it means being locked into Apples Walled Garden, however beautiful it is?

Apples actions are undeniably to increase lock-in and protect the proprietary (i.e. closed) aspects of their business model. (Joel West)

From a consumer perspective, the ideal situation is when the operator delivers "dumb networks" and the phone manufacturers delivers "open platforms".

The iPhone is the anti-thesis of this thinking. The device is exclusive to particular operators, it is a closed device. It has more restrictions on what kind of content you can access that any other device in its class. The device caters primarily to Apple content. A lot of the content that is traditionally sold "on deck" or "off deck" like ringtones and games can not run on the iPhone. On the other hand content from Apple like music and video is very well integrated through iTunes.

I may be biased, but the fact is that the trend is towards openness, not away from it. On the Enterprise side, the trend is open or industry-standard platforms where third-party applications can run as first class passengers and access networks without hindrance. Does Ovi and iTunes mean that the trend is towards closed environments on the Consumer side?

iPhone will attack Sony Ericsson but lose out to Nokia in Europe

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The iPhone is called a Smartphone by the US press. This is a misnomer, but it doesn't really matter. When the iPhone is introduced in Europe in a few months, its is initially going to compete with Feature Phones from Sony Ericsson and Nseries "multimedia computers" from Nokia. My prediction: The iPhone will give Sony Ericsson a severe beating, but will eventually lose out to Nokia.

This is what the manufacturers are thinking about their high-end phones:

• The device philosophy of Sony Ericsson is: Phones with one additional feature. Sony Ericsson have their "Walkman" series of music phones and their "Cybershot" series of camera phones.
• The device philosophy of Nokia is: The mobile phone is the new computer. The Nseries phones are "open platform devices" where you can connect to any network and install whatever software, service or life hack you need to support your digital lifestyle.
• The device philosophy of Apple is: Phone, iPod and Internet device on a closed platform.
  

The iPhone is currently a closed device with very basic functionality, but it has turned the "mobile phone world" on its head. Its a beautiful but expensive device. It does not do a lot, but what it does, it does better that anyone else.
Sony Ericsson makes a lot of money from their Walkman branded phones, phones that are marketed as music players. The only problem is that they are truly miserable music players compared to the iPhone. The iPod and the iTunes ecosystem has set the standard for portable music players and Sony Ericsson does not even come close.

The trouble with the Sony Ericsson Walkman phones is not the phones themselves. The trouble is that Sony Ericsson depends on the operators to deliver the music to the phones and the operators are messing up. The experience of putting a song onto a handset , whether it is by downloading over the air or by side loading from a PC, is just poor. This has led to speculations recently; people buy phones for their music playing capabilities, but are they actually playing music on them?

Apple does not suffer the same operator dependence when it comes to user experience for the music player. Any customer who want a phone + music player device is likely to select the iPhone over a Walkman phone. This may force Sony Ericsson to lower prices.

Nokia on the other hand is taking steps to avoid the operator trap that Sony Ericsson currently sits in. How? Well, by copying Apple. According to Anssi Vanjoki (the guy with the $103,600 speeding ticket) Nokia will "copy with pride". And why not? As Russel Beattie points out in his (too busy but otherwise excellent) blog:

...it will take Apple several *years* to come up with a competing product that has anywhere near these level of features. Apple just doesn't have the mobile hardware chops to do it themselves. [...] They don't have the experience, know how or partnerships to get it done and still be profitable.

As I have pointed out before, the iPhone ease-of-use is nothing magic. Apple has done a fantastic job, and the most fantastic part is that here is a company that has the balls to actually do it.

But Apple has created a closed walled garden product and who wants to live in a walled garden? Tying the device to a particular operator, not letting anyone install as much as a small Java game or a ringtone on the device without Apples consent?? Please! Do you think we live in Albania or the US or something?

Nokia have to do 3 things right to rule the universe:

1. Get their user interface together and
2. deliver an operator independent experience as delightful as iTunes
3. on a open device

EDIT: fixed the loose/lose typo.

The UI difference

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I want to invite you to my new gig over at Light Thinking. We are devloping light gadgets for photographers. You can't be a designer and not be into photography at some level. Maybe you know about the whole off-camera strobe movement that originated over at at strobist? Maybe you even know about the new HDSLR cameras and all the amazing stuff people are doing with them? Visit Light Thinking

 

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Andreas Constantinou over at VisionMobile has a very good post called How the iPhone is impacting the mobile industry. One of his points is that UI technology is coming to the forefront.

The appeal and sexiness of the iPhone user interface is actually leading to the appreciation of the value of the UI as a tangible premium (tangible as in ’see how much premium the iPhone can command!’).

Of the Tier 1 mobile phone manufacturers, most are hardware oriented; only Nokia and Sony Ericsson have a holistic view of the phone as a integrated software and hardware experience. These two would be the only Tier 1 manufacturers able to create new products that could match the iPhone.

What makes the iPhone UI so compelling?

In many respects the iPhone and the Nokia N95 are competitors. They are both high priced, high-end devices, but they come from completely different philosophies. The N95 is probably the most technically advanced consumer device ever made. On this planet anyway. The amount of sophisticated hardware packed into a unit the size of a pack of cards is simply unbelievable. Very few manufacturers, if any, can match this level of mobile phone high-tech.

The iPhone internals on the other hand are bog-standard, end of hardware story. (With the exception of the touch screen and the very innovative use of multitouch.) High end phones have been a feature race. What Apple has done is changing the playing field. Don't compete on features, compete on user experience.

Simplicity investigated

How do you make something easy to use? There are a few elements to this. One is to decrease the distance between user knowledge and target knowledge. User knowledge is what the user knows now, target knowledge is what the user has to know in order to use the product. The difference is called the knowledge gap. It the gap is small or non-existent, the product is easy to use. Add to the equation discoverability, learnability and consistency.

Making an easy to use product can be very hard, or it can be fairly simple. Let's look at what Apple has done:

Less features. Apple has severely limited the features compared to the competition. The iPhone is designed for primary use cases only. Either you call someone or you don't. No fancy video calls, no VOIP calls, no PTT (Press-to-talk), no cut and paste, no SIM management, etc, etc, the list goes on.

Better visibility. The iPhone UI does not use menus. All functions are visible on the screen (except gestures; the gestures are invisible and you have to learn them from demonstration or the manual). Softkey based phones mostly uses a system where you have the "content" visible on the screen and the "actions" available on the softkeys. As soon as you get more that 2 possible "actions", you label one of the softkeys "options" and pop up a menu with the rest of the actions.

Direct manipulation. You tap right there on the screen with your finger. There is no indirect manipulation via softkeys. This means a single touch to call someone. On a softkey phone you may have to scroll to the phone number and move your thumb over to the green call key. Or you scroll to the number, select "options" to bring up the menu, scroll and click "Voicecall" from the menu. Direct manipulation is very powerful and probably the primary reason that people find the iPhone easy to use.

Outside assistance. The iPhone offloads tasks to iTunes. This is OK for the US market where Apple can expect practically 100% of their potential customers to have a PC. This is not the case in other parts of the world. The main issue would be sideloading the iPod. Building iTunes into the phone could probably be done, but it's no easy task.

The future might not be so simple

I am not going to guess what direction the iPhone will go, but it is very likely that Apple will add features to the phone. Where are these features going to go? Apple has several alternatives:

Add more buttons. It won't take long before the iPhone run out of screen real estate. You can't make the buttons too small or people with sausage fingers will miss them. Then, you will have to scroll the screen or spread functions over several screens.

Add menus. Its possible that Apple will start using a tap and hold gesture to bring up a menu. Not an entirely bad solution, but you sacrifice some discoverability.

Add more gestures. The iPhone has a limited number of initial gestures. Gestures have to be system wide. You can't add gestures for individual features. New gestures are comparatively hard to teach users and you are probably going to need redundancy. If you add a new gesture for "clear" (for example shake the phone) it is probably only going to work as a shortcut for the existing clear commands. Hmmm, "edit" would probably be a better example here.

Add hardware buttons. Expensive, and it goes against Apples stated philosophy. (But I would not rule out a hardware key for the camera shutter. Especially if Apple decides to make a cameraphone variant of the iPhone.)

Some other wild and wonderful way. There may be other possibilities lurking somewhere in Cosmos and waiting to be discovered. Until then, the iPhone will gain features and loose some of its ease of use.

The normal evolution of successful products is that a lean and mean product attacs where the competition is weak. It gains traction, then adds more and more features until it becomes a feature bloated object of discontent. This is especially true for software. "We have to add features to expand our market and stay ahead of the competition." A great example is the old WordPerfect story. WordPerfect, adding every possible feature users asked for, ended up having a gazillion features. All of them invoked from different key combinations. Users needed 2 week courses to learn to use it. Along comes a revolutionary product that has 10% of the features, but all the features are easily available from this new and fancy thing called menus. Its so easy to use that anybody can sit down and start to use it right away! That product is called Microsoft Word 1.0 and it takes over the word processor market.

There is nothing magic about the iPhone ease of use. Reduce the number of functions until they all fit onto the screen and let people interact directly with them. Apple deserves kudos for having the skills to do it, and the guts, stamina and balls to see it thru. Congratulation Apple, you have changed the mobile phone industry. Take care you don't change into the mobile industry.

News on the softkey front

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I want to invite you to my new gig over at Light Thinking. We are devloping light gadgets for photographers. You can't be a designer and not be into photography at some level. Maybe you know about the whole off-camera strobe movement that originated over at at strobist? Maybe you even know about the new HDSLR cameras and all the amazing stuff people are doing with them? Visit Light Thinking

 

Things are finally shaping up on the softkey front. Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson is converging on the context aware default action for the middle softkey.

Sony Ericsson

Sony Ericsson recently announced that they will introduce a new softkey layout and a different menu scheme for the upcoming JP-8 phones. JP stands for Sony Ericsson Java Platform and JP-8 is the most recent. It is notable for JSR 248 (Mobile Service Architecture) support. MSA aims to dramatically lower the device fragmentation issues that has plagued Java ME from the start.

(image: Sony Ericsson)

Note the entirely new menu scheme

(images: Sony Ericsson)

Compare the Z610 (old layout) to the Z750 (new layout).

Motorola

Motorola has launched the Z8. This phone runs Symbian and UIQ. The user interface was developed by UIQ and Sagem their UK Sendo team.

(image: Motorola)

As you see from the image, the phone uses 3 softkeys and the context aware default action. (They proceed to mess it up right there on the first screen by adding "Camera" on the right menu button. Using a softkey to do a mode switch is completely misguided and a standing invitation to usability problems. Its probably added by some ignorant in the marketing department.)

For all my Motorola-bashing, I still think the Z8 looks like a great phone and I'm going to try to get my hands on one.

Nokia

Nokia did get its menu system for Series 40 into good shape after a couple iterations.

Now, it looks like Series 60 also will be taking full advantage of the middle softkey in addition to a number of other UI enhancements. Series 60 3rd Edition feature Pack 2 will be released in Q3 2007.

(image: Nokia)

Screen dump from Series 60 3rd Edition feature Pack 2.