BIMA Blog

I recently came across the design by community webpage by Nokia, which is a ‘crowd sourcing’ attempt to engage real users in the product design of a new handset. Every week, Nokia asked real users to comment on important aspects of their new generation phone such as the operating system, user interfaces, materials, camera, the connectivity and everything else. Nokia are getting real users to ‘spec’ and design their next phone for them.

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.