Posts Filed Under ux
Nokia Contacts Bar
Photo © Nokia, London, 2008.
On October 3rd at Remix in London, Nokia unveiled the new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, a mobile device for music and social media consumption with a touch-screen. The Nokia 5800 is among the first devices to support Comes With Music, the Media bar, and the home-screen Contacts Bar widget.
I had the opportunity to participate briefly in the early phases of the product development. The product program team and Nokia Design addressed together a number of physical and digital design themes, and very quickly the large 3.2″ touch-screen emerged a great opportunity. In any product, the home-screen is a prime piece of real-estate and mind share, and more often than not, it is the least useful – except to show off your dog, cat, kid, wife/husband/gf/bf, etc. and see what time it is.
The aim was to provide the best music and social media experience possible right from the home-screen by executing on our brand promises: Very human technology and Feeling close, and insights Nokia Design had gathered along the years of observing how people consume media and communicate with their most important people.
People communicate through media.
People access content through people.
The future of media is social.
Simply it was about designing a social media experience that is as human and natural as possible by making multimedia communication reflect the way people think and feel.
Photo © Nokia, 2008.
We wanted to be literal about People Connecting and offer the most explicit representation of human technology and feeling close. We designed a home-screen widget, named Contacts Bar, that shows at a glance the faces of your most important people, your recent activity with them – texts, calls, emails – as well as their latest online media activity from sites such as OVI, Facebook, Flickr, etc.
A picture is worth a thousand words… the myriad of digital photos, music tracks, and videos being shared daily is a clear demonstration that people communicate with more than words . Media allows people to vary and fine-tune the intensity, emotion, and intimacy of their communications. The Contacts Bar is about giving people additional choices on how they explore, live, work, and connect with their most important people.
The press release and additional information can be found in the press section of Nokia.com.
Filed Under: communication, design, mobilephones, Nokia, product, ui, ux
User Interface Concepts from A View of the Future
This second installment is presenting the UI design principles and creative decisions for some of lifestyles Nokia is focusing on: Achieve, Live, and Connect.
The intent was to stretch each category language into new domains and experiences while maintaining Nokia design DNA and brand. During the creative process where people and content were prioritized above everything else, a set of common design elements emerged such as soft forms, tactility and gestures, simplicity and elegance, beauty and smiles.
Our ultimate goal: Simply beautiful communication.
Achieve
Our vision aspires to natural solutions which enhance collaboration a leap forward from today’s cumbersome implements. We are living in an age of virtual teams where people must work without the benefit of in-person sessions using video conferences and remote presentation tools.
Mobile video conferencing becomes easier and more productive when participants are able to visually identify who has joined the call and who is currently speaking, to mute speakers at the touch of a finger, or to start a private conversation with another participant. The dual touch-screen provides enough space to display at once large still or moving faces, documents preview, and contextual actions. The goal was to combine in one glance the people and get-things-done aspects of video conferencing.
Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.
The approach to get-things-done is to provide flexible, natural, and powerful multitasking capabilities with side-by-side view, tiled view, messy desk view. Applications or documents can be left open, pushed to the background, tucked under other things or just minimised to support streamlined or disjointed workflow.
Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.
Input is a critical aspect of the workflow – we all know how annoying it is to have a mouse or a pen that does not work. To afford complex and versatile interactions, we classified the most important workflow and optimised their interaction for either stylus or finger input based on parameters like accuracy, speed, most-likely context, satisfaction, and playfulness.
Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.
Achieve is about what will become possible in the near future when the current limits of mobile communication are erased.
Live
Live looks at the devices we own and what they say about us. We choose our objects because they speak to us in a special way: surfaces are inviting to touch, interfaces are at once intuitive and beautiful, forms are pleasing to interact with. We choose them because they communicate something that we want to be known. The physical and digital blend seamlessly and behave like chameleon to match your many moods and desires. Appearance skins can be created from photographs, music tracks, usage patterns, or simply by sensing the environment.
Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.
The influence of femininity emanates very clearly in this category where shapes and content blend in unique designs.
Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.
All the little moments – gestures and glances that create an atmosphere and help people bond, have been distilled in these personalisable and socially oriented devices. Giving your number simply by touching the other device (near-field communication), inviting and guiding your friends to the next place (navigation GPS or otherwise), etc.
Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.
Live celebrates good design as an expression of beautifully crafted artifacts which involve us in their completion.
Connect
Connect captures core Nokia values and what we value most as humans: staying close to the people that matter. Interfaces are kept perfectly simple in the service of human connection. Memories are collected and filed away to be savored later. Mobile technology is easy to use and available to everyone from the very young to the very old and all of the people who care about them.
People centered communication is the essence of connect, and faces are the portrayal of people. We felt that they should duly take a prominent stand in the design language. The interaction becomes personal and efficient since people recognise faces much faster than words.
Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.
Connect is about facilitating communication with your most important people, all forms of communications. A natural extension to current practices is speech recognition where natural speech can be transcribed into a text message, a note, a task, etc. It lowers the threshold for features like text messaging and email to those that are not comfortable inputing text on a mobile phone keypad.
Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.
It was also important to acknowledge the greater ecosystem of home and entertainment appliances which provides an great environment to share, explore, and consume content. We purposefully used “cliché” examples of the fridge and TV shying away from the much more compelling implementations coming soon.
Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.
Connect is the embodiment of Nokia‘s wish to connect all people.
A View of the Future was created in the spring of 2006.
Nokia Design In & Out Speaker Series – Nova/Chipchase
In a spirit of openness and education, In & Out Speaker Series invite designers, thinkers, experts, hobbyists, activists, etc. well people to engage in an exchange of thoughts and ideas with us. Us is Nokia Design Americas -a 20-people team based in Los Angeles doing advanced design with backgrounds in product, graphic, interaction, colour & material, motion design.
Nicolas Nova and Jan Chipchase were our first guests in our Topenga Canyon venue. Nicolas discussed tangible interfaces and some potential misconceptions drawn from user experience research, concepts. It’s absolutely not academic research but more “food for thoughts” for designers, like what I do for video game companies. This material is meant to trigger some insights and discussion about design problems/solutions and ideas.
Jan talked about how people do things 
Filed Under: design, in&out, interaction, losangeles, Nokia, ux
Where's the Phone?
In 2004, I participated in a series of studies to understand where people carry mobile phones. Fumiko Ichikawa presented the first public results of this research in a paper entitled Where’s the Phone – a Study of Mobile Phone Location in Public Spaces (pdf – 343KB) at the Mobility 2005 conference in Guangzhou, China. This paper draws on data from the first 3 studies – Helsinki, Milan and New York.
I recommend you read Jan Chipchase detailed blog post about this and the follow up studies in Korea, China, Japan, etc.
Towards a solution
I just came back from DUX2005 in San Francisco; and frankly it was frustrating and disappointing. Without going into specifics, I realized that it is vital for me and the company I work for to share and discuss some of our findings, processes, and concerns with the mobile UX/UI industry.
Until now, I felt my contribution was not necessary since this guy, this one and this other one were already doing a stunning job. DUX2005 proved me wrong. Let’s see if another voice will make a difference.
Filed Under: design, losangeles, Nokia, ux