Is S60 easy enough? How can Nokia improve the user experiance?
By Stefan Constantinescu on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 12:49 PM PST In Symbian
Why not set things up so that the same application, or even S60 as a whole, can look and behave in different ways according to the personal preference and ability of the person using the smartphone?I remember 10 years ago when the desktop email application Eudora came with three different levels of interface complexity, from simple through to advanced. When installed, it asked you which one you’d like and then it presented you with just the level of menu/icon/pane complexity you’d asked for. Thus, beginner home users wouldn’t get bogged down in complex folder and rule management, and so on. At any time, if you wanted to change the level of interface, you could do so in Settings.
Why could the same idea not be applied to complex S60 applications like Web (reducing the number of menu options in ’simple’ mode, especially important as more and more functionality gets shoehorned into the program) and Messaging (for example removing ‘My folders’, ‘Reports’, ‘Cell broadcast’, ‘Service command’ etc in ’simple’ mode)?
I’m going to have to disagree with the last two sentences of your post: "An optional ‘S60 Lite’, maybe? Ditto developers – two apps in one, depending on user experience?"
After using many mobile operating systems S60 is still the most logical I’ve ever encountered. It may require more steps than Palm (NSDQ: PALM) and it may be uglier than Windows Mobile, but I never found myself struggling to figure out how to do something.
I don’t see how burdening Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and developers with the task of creating simpler versions of full featured applications will benefit S60 as a platform.
Segmentation should be avoided at all costs. A user should learn about all the features their device has by the same way you learn how to use a remote control. You push all the buttons and see what happens. On the flip side of the coin, I believe that S60 should learn to adapt itself to what a user is currently doing. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s latest Office 2007 is a brilliant example of task based menus. They change depending on what you want to do.
If S60 or third party developers can create something along those lines then I won’t complain.
Learning how to use a smart phone is no where near as intense as trying to learn all the advanced functionality email programs like Eudora or Outlook provide, nor the feature rich capabilities of an Office Suite.
I purchased my first S60 device in September of 2006. After less than a week I became a Jedi Master. I’m still learning hot keys, but then again I’ve been using Windows for more than a decade and I’m still discovering new keyboard shortcuts!
I would tend to also think that a S60 lite would confuse more than help – but of course its hard to say without having seen a demo or similar of what it would really be. Just to speculate/play around with thoughts, if a S60 lite was ever to come around, it could be made available on lower end phones, without possibility to use the complex version. I.e. a S60 Lite for the purposes of product differentation?
I am repeating what I said on Tommi’s S60 blog, as its sorta/kinda related. In general at least the version of S60 that runs my ancient 6600 (yes, someone is still using it in hopes of N75 finally coming to Cingular..
) tends to ask to way too many confirmations, or at least ones that would be great to be able to bypass. Example: delete an SMS >> My good ol’ Nokia goes something like “do you really really want to delete this?”, instead of deleting right away. The problem of accidental deletes could be handled by a trash folder (that would auto-empty itself at set intervals or prompt you to empty it every now and then) or an undo option (I am not sure if this is technically feasibly though).
Alan Cooper ( http://www.cooper.com/ ) says something about this on his About Face 2.0 book. He says that systems with expert/novice modes do not provide good usability and it’s not something that should be used, and that interaction designer should design to the middle point between novice and expert thus catering to most needs at once. He gives a bunch of reasons for this (interface consistency, etc).