Preface

This book is different from many others about user interface design and usability in that all chapters are about one company—Nokia—and all are written by Nokia employees, present or former. In other companies, books about user interface (UI) design, such as those by Bergman^[1] and Wiklund,^[2] are typically written by one or two authors presenting a coherent opinion. The latter gives readers a harmonious idea of how things work there, what represents state of art in the company, and what needs to be improved. Reading such material from a Nokia point of view, especially for the editors of this book, creates ambivalence. How can they keep the whole thing on track so well? Do they actually reach agreement on everything? Sure, they have the same problems with people outside the usability or design organization who don’t “get it,” but inside the organization communications seem clear and perspectives aligned. What happens when team members have something else to say?

The picture of user interface design and usability research that readers will take away from this book is admittedly more fragmented and contentious. This outcome is partly planned, given that we set out to present a whole range of usability approaches at work, but partly it took the editors by surprise. We had asked authors to emphasize their personal conclusions about what is essential and what they themselves learned in their projects. They did that. The result was a collection of experiences and opinions that do not seem to fit together. What is the Nokia usability process? Which methods do we use? How are users integrated into design work? How is design integrated with research? Who makes the decisions? What resources are needed? What is the essence of mobility in user interface design? Can we stay in the lab, or do we need field tests? What is our vision? What is the core of our expertise? The answers depend on whom you ask. Authors with different responsibilities and different professional backgrounds work in many positions throughout the organization. They care about different things and raise different issues. Their opinions vary accordingly.

Is there anything common to all the chapters? Let me answer by trying out an analogy on you. The typical household may be completely satisfied with its compact camera. Every feature in the camera is consistent with the whole, making the object easy to handle. There are no conflicts between the parts of the product. It is cheap to buy, and the quality of the pictures is good—when you snap in favorable circumstances with a lot of light, that is, and if your subject stands still and you get close enough. At least the pictures are good enough for the family album. The camera does the job, and this is the job it was built to do.

The authors in this book don’t get to talk about well-lit stationary subjects in close range. They have to talk about elusive subjects that are difficult to expose and that demand specialized solutions. At the end of the day the image captured will be cleaned, sized, and sharpened for printing on the cover of the most widely read magazine in the world, The Public Record. No camera has been built for this job; the whole bag of equipment is needed.

Everything begins with a reliable instrument. The best film, the best lenses—your camera has to be flexible enough to accept them. All your valuable accessories and your special skills—they’d be of little use if you needed a different camera body for each shot. The chapters in Part 1 reveal the framework of Nokia user interfaces. User interface styles provide the common logic for all new features, and a majority of user interface creation activities culminate in solutions matching existing styles. Styles have a huge influence on the user’s experience with our products, and internally they streamline software processes in implementing new models.

A reliable and robust instrument.

They also are everyday tools used by the designers. Can you realize that feature with Navi-key style? The styles are surprisingly flexible; more and more new features but very few new styles have been added. Once in a while new features do challenge the limits of existing styles, but not often. Harri Kiljander and Johanna Järnström (Chap. 1) introduce Nokia user interface styles and discuss the principles of maintaining an appropriate style portfolio. Seppo Helle, Johanna Järnström, and Topi Koskinen (Chap. 2) focus on style elements: the mobile menu, control keys, and user interface graphics. While keys and their functionality remain pretty consistent with a styles approach, the part of a mobile UI that bears the brunt of accommodating new features is the menu.

The right lenses, reflectors, and filters for your camera are determined by your subject, your style, and the purpose of the picture. With a standard 50-mm usability lens something essential may be cropped out. You can, of course, step back, or in our case wait until you see the effects of a design solution once implemented. But if you need to include more of the scenery from where you stand right now, you need a contextual wide angle of 24 mm, maybe even a sociological fisheye. With these lenses, everything that is important will be exposed. You will get the big picture, with things in their proper places. The details may not be particularly sharp, but they are there to be seen. In Part 2 Katja Konkka (Chap. 4) gives us a panorama picture from Mombai (formerly Bombay), India. The richness of detail is amazing. Riitta Nieminen-Sundell and Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila (Chap. 5) explain the advantages of the fisheye and teach us how to zoom out.

Sociological wide-angle lens—FD 28 mm 1:2.8 for contextual user comprehension.

Suppose that you glimpse something that looks interesting on the horizon, but can’t quite make it out. You start digging in your camera bag for a telephoto lens. With that you can focus on telling details that are hard to discern from a distance. Using a 400-mm telephoto vision lens calls for special skills, of course. You can easily miss a moving target, and it may be difficult to focus the lens precisely and keep it steady enough for the instant of exposure. Maybe you’ll need ultraviolet filters to reveal objects in the haze. And finally you have to load the camera with extremely sensitive film to compensate for all the complicating factors. Panu Korhonen and Pete Dixon (Chap. 12) try these tricky gadgets. Do they have an image stabilizer?

When you start to be pretty sure that the object in your crosshairs is what you’re looking for, the next step is to set up a tripod. With your camera and telephoto on a firm footing, the image will be much clearer. The firm basis on which user interfaces are built is the enabling communication technology. Jussi Pekkarinen and Jukka Salo (Chap. 10) talk about their efforts to erect a platform from which to make a good picture of the mobile Internet. In their story the target was in sight, but freehand images were never sharp enough.

Any professional photographer’s bag includes a selection of lenses for proper granularity. Miika Silfverberg (Chap. 7) writes about the macro lenses and extension tubes with which he focuses on the users’ ability to input text. The setting for such a picture must be carefully constructed. You’ll need the right kind of lights positioned at the perfect angles; you’ll need time to check the aperture. Perhaps you’ll want to consult the exposure tables and consider correction factors. To control all the variables, it’s best to stay in the studio. Often this technology reveals details that are not visible to the naked eye, even the most experienced one.

Lab test extension tubes—extension tube set M20 for optimizing critical details.

There are always times when a photographer is just not sure about composition or lighting, even with all the right equipment deployed. Maybe she has a fair idea of what will happen when she depresses the shutter on the basis of her professional experience, but the idea never matches the real image perfectly. She could shoot each picture and process and print it on site, but that takes too much time at a live shoot. Her solution is to snap a Polaroid, wait the few seconds for the test image to appear, maybe show it to the clients, adjust the composition as necessary, and snap again. Only when everything meets her standards does she load the camera with real film. Ketola (Chap. 8) and Keinonen (Chap. 9) also use Polaroid images. They have a normal 50-mm usability lens, but their film is selected for adjusting angles, not for taking the picture.

Iterative instant camera—Polaroid for design iterations and discussion.

On the street, all your options are in your bag. Some photographers are continually on the move. They never know whether their next assignment will be breaking news, an environmental portrait, a football match, or an annual report. Carrying enough equipment for all contingencies would be backbreaking, so they get practical. A zoom lens may not give ideal exposures, but it replaces a whole lot of special-purpose glass. Lindholm’s managerial approach to user interface development (Chaps. 3 and 6) requires us to zoom in and out on cue. In an acceptable result, the details have to be recognizable and we must be able to tell where they belong.

John Rieman (Chap. 11) writes about people who shoot action. They do not have time to take meter readings or Polaroids; they need to act in the moment. If you start to doubt, the moment is lost. These guys need to master their camera and the all-purpose 50-mm usability lens without any

Infinite zoom from telephoto to microscope in one turn for design management vision to design management attention to detail. hesitation. A flash gives them the only tool they need to shoot in any circumstance.

Heuristic flash—740-1 for decision heuristics.

The camera bag metaphor is misleading in several aspects, and inspired by technologies that belong to the past. Still, I hope it helps convey the message that for an enterprise delving deep into user interface design and usability, and an enterprise counting on the expertise of individuals, objects of study present themselves through the lens of perspectives and contexts, not as formal entities. There start to be more shades, more approaches and more opinions. The approaches are neither right nor wrong—they are different.

References

1. E. Bergman, ed., Information Appliances and Beyond, Interaction Design for Consumer Products. Orlando, Fla.: Morgan-Kaufmann, 1999.

2. M. E. Wiklund, ed., Usability in Practice: How Companies Develop User Friendly Products. Boston: Academic Press, 1994.

^[1]E. Bergman, ed., Information Appliances and Beyond, Interaction Design for Consumer Products. Orlando, Fla.: Morgan-Kaufmann, 1999.

^[2]M. E. Wiklund, ed., Usability in Practice: How Companies Develop User Friendly Products. Boston: Academic Press, 1994.