The ‘community design’ exercise ended up with a comprehensive mobile phone specification detailing an ‘iPhone beating’ 4 inch open source OS (mostly) touch screen interface. One of the users said, “…Touch GUIs are for tourists. They are the current trend at the moment, but not very handy in long run – we all know that”.  Throughout the process of ‘user centred design’ Nokia asked the users to “Check back every week to watch the device take shape, with the latest specs added as you vote for them.” This clearly created anticipation but the webpage ended up looking like a blog article with thousands of comments to navigate through.

The concept of user centred product design
Firstly, the idea is great. Getting real users involved in the design process is the future of any design discipline. Interactive Media folk also do it under the umbrella of UCD (User Centred Design). It is very easy to utilise services like ask 500 to get feedback during the design phase, use survey tools on websites such as get satisfaction or user voice and even conduct small focus groups with real users.

Smart designers will user test early during the development phases using offline or online user testing. I would always recommend using professional user testing tools such as morae or eye tracking. Early this month Nokia announced that one of the users (called Burak) coined the new device the ‘Nokia U’. This name has been voted as the winning name and the phone designers are currently “…beavering away behind the scenes, preparing concept sketches…”

Ways to get feedback
Secondly, I love the idea of getting real user feedback into the design of a new phone but feel the web page design could be improved. It is virtually impossible to navigate through user comments in a topical/contextual way. For example, if I want to find all user comments relating to the Operating System, where do I do this? The answer is scrolling through thousands of comments… The web page has some contextual links such as the “winner is” but some posts don’t directly relate to the actual community design exercise.

In addition, the top navigation of the web page takes users away from the design schedule and discussion into a more ‘general’ Design by Community website by Nokia. This issue could have been solved by creating a dedicated microsite specifically for this handset project with the Design by Community website serving as a landing page with a link to this microsite and future ones (if Nokia plan on more of these design exercises in the future).

Conclusion
It is exciting to see a major vendor such as Nokia conducting such an open and large scale user centred design exercise. Nokia have risked getting negative comments in the posts with some users dismissing the Symbian OS. This shows willingness by Nokia to genuinely learn and improve the product and brand while creating anticipation by clever crowd sourcing and online marketing. My next BIMA blog article about locative media will be published on this blog on the 30^th June 2010.

James was an advocate of Nielsen-Norman-Togg’s philosophy and wrote ‘The Elements of User Experience’ which has a major impact on web design folk world-wide. His original diagram of ‘how to create a website / software’ was created almost ten years ago (below) and had a major influence on my own UX processes and work throughout the years.

Besides his role in defining user experience processes, he coined the term AJAX in 2005. Later that year he received Wired Magazine’s Rave Award for Technology. I consider James an evangelist in preaching innovative user experience processes and thought patterns.At UX London 2010 James started by saying that “User Experience design (or Experience Design as he calls it) has dramatically changed and now encompasses multiple domains”. He proceeded to say that the role of a UX (User Experience) designer is to create multi-channel experiences and to provide the audience with “orchestration”:

Experience design is independent of a medium

•   ‘Use’ – Makes user experience have a meaning

•    Experiences are intangible and subjective

•    How do we define a great experience? Through ‘Engagement’

The senses

By ‘playing’ with human senses, designers can create immersive engagements. By looking at other creative disciplines we can learn how to ‘manipulate’ the senses:

1. Sense of sight –  Movie directors and cinematographers lead viewers to focus on strategic areas using narrative

2. Sound -  Beethoven orchestrated his musicians (the implementation team) indulging audiophiles through the sense of sound.

3. Smell -   When walking into a luxurious spa one is immersed by the scents of oils and aromatherapy creating a sense of calmness.

4. Taste – Chefs from various cuisines often play with our sense of ‘taste’ creating excitement. By staging a meal and separating it into various stages they can create anticipation.

5. Sense of Balance & Notion – Garret announced a fifth sense which plays on our physical sense of balance. He claimed that ‘Mirrors Edge’ a ‘first person’ addictive computer game makes some players ‘sick’…

According to Garret there are 4 dimensions of notions:

• Perception – Visual design moulds our perception into what the designer wants.

• Cognition – By using Information Architecture designers govern how the mind processes information.

• Emotion – Sometimes humans make illogical and emotional decisions. Emotional thinking has been widely documented by Donald Norman in books such as ‘The Design of Everyday Things’.

• Action – The notion of action involves the ‘engagement’ of the body and includes touching and clicking.

The goal of the designer is to engage as many of these notions as possible.

James concluded his keynote by announcing that the role of a UX Designers is to analysis, synthesis and orchestrate. This is challenging because every human is different and has unique capabilities, distinctive contextual understanding and constraints.

To implement a successful user experience we need to consider audiences carefully looking at the polar extremes of users. What might seem obvious to one user may be difficult for another. This can be solved by involving all types of users in the Experience design process.

Designing a great experience

James Jesse Garret, author of ‘The Elements of User Experience’ gave his talk on designing for engagement; he reminded us that UX is not limited by medium. For example, in the art of cinematography engagement is manufactured through sight and the way the eye is trained to look at certain elements in a certain way. User Experience Designers can make use of a variety of senses in this way.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to hold user’s attention, so we must create experiences that engage users and encourage them to spend time with your product. In his talk entitled ‘The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions’ Stephen Anderson highlighted several ways in which we can create an experience that is simultaneously enjoyable for the user and informative for the system.

Search

Our industry is increasingly driven by search. Peter Morville spoke of how, by creating a more effective search system; Home Depot increased conversations by 30%. This shows the true value of effective search in parallel with an easy navigation system.

Failing Early

Michael Johnson of Pixar gave an entertaining and insightful talk about Pixar’s development process, which involves making each film as a full length prototype with stand in voices, SFX and soundtrack. Of course this adds considerable time to the project (their films take up to seven years to complete), but allows them spot things that won’t work early while it’s easier and cheaper to fix.

Seductive Interactions

Stephen Anderson is the creator of ‘Mental Notes’ cards which are designed to provide ‘jumping points’ at brainstorming sessions. There are 50 cards in total and each one of them features a concept to provide a simple starting point for completely original and complex ideas.

It was my first time at UX London and I consider it a really valuable experience.

Jakob Nielsen at the BIMA dinner London May 2009

Mobile Usability
Whilst at the dinner, Nielson revealed that amongst other things, he is currently concerned by the usability of UK websites on mobile devices. We also discussed the best mobile user interfaces and he mentioned that in his view, the iPhone is the most user friendly device, followed closely by Google’s Android platform.

Nielson interestingly commented that the UK is lagging behind the US in terms of ‘mobile user friendly websites’. Whilst many UK websites have been poor in this respect in Nielson’s opinion, he did cite BBC’s mobile website as an example of a mobile website interface done right.

So why are so many UK websites getting it wrong when it comes to mobile? The main reason, according to Nielson is that UK firms are struggling to strike a balance between having an interface that isn’t too complicated to be usable and an interface that hasn’t been too ‘dumbed-down’ and simplified for mobile delivery.

From Desktop To Mobile
Whilst still on the subject of mobile web, Nielson was asked if he could see the role of the traditional desktop and mouse diminishing as a result of mobile devices. He stated that the world has seen 20 years of WIMP interfaces and that wasn’t going to change overnight. For the most part people will continue to use mobile for times when they are on the move, meaning more people will use the web at times and places where traditionally they would not have (such as doing product/price comparisons when walking around a shopping mall).

Also, as the trend of desktop screen sizes and Internet speeds increasing continues, so will the trend for web interfaces to utilise more space, and have more rich content that would have been thought impossible 10 years ago.

However, as gesture-based user interfaces such as Nintendo Wii and iPhones continue to grow in popularity, traditional WIMP interfaces could be under threat, although realistically this won’t happen anytime soon.

Googability…
We jumped from the topic of mobile to that of Google and their near-omnipresent role online in accessing and finding information. The term ‘Googlability’ was mentioned, roughly meaning how likely a search is to bring up relevant or credible results. Generally, most users will click one of the first 3 links in the SERPs, regardless of credibility. This means that many users could be duped into believing a source or website is trustworthy or credible, when it isn’t.

The only solution to this, said Nielson, is for such user’s to become more educated in Googlability and how to use search engines more effectively and how to determine whether a content provider is to be trusted. That, or for Google to improve their algorithm to judge a website’s credibility.

Has Usability Improved In The Last 10 Years?
Nielson was asked “How are today’s websites comparing to those of 10 years ago?” According to the usability guru, the easiest way is to compare conversion rates. 10 years ago, the average conversion rate of an eCommerce website was just 1%, whereas now the average is over 2%. This he said, is a result of a shift in focus towards satisfying customer needs as companies have learnt more and more about online consumer behaviour.