Sturdy Boosters Wanted

The menu is a good tool for occasional use, but it may become boring to navigate over time. Besides, menus and option lists are getting longer, or the hierarchical structure of applications is getting deeper, or both. Some frustration caused by long and deep menus can be reduced by arranging the menus carefully; important and frequently used features should be accessible from the top screens and at the beginning of lists. Sooner or later, though, different users need different features, and they can’t all be first. We have to provide shortcuts for customers who want to speed up their interaction with the phone. A shortcut is an alternative, quicker way to select a function. Shortcuts (see examples in Figure 2.8) are hidden beneath the visible level of the user interface, which means that there are no labels on the screens or prints on the keys to guide the user. Shortcuts require learning on the user’s part. Therefore, they cannot replace a menu, and we cannot build UI performance measurements on shortcuts alone. A shortcut is an amenity to enhance the experience of the keen and demanding.

Figure 2.8: Shortcuts associated with key 5. Nokia phones are bubbling with shortcuts, but it depends on which one(s) the user applies. The shortcuts provided depend on the current status. In the idle screen, in phonebook scrolling, and in text entry state the shortcuts change accordingly to allow efficient operation for those who take the trouble to learn to use them. The figure lists the possible shortcuts that are related or can be associated with key 5.

A good shortcut does not interfere with ordinary usage, is somehow memorable, lets users feel they are in control, and above all, actually reduces the effort to accomplish something.

An example of a shortcut combining many of these benefits is the redial shortcut, where we use the green send key as a shortcut to redial list. When the phone is in idle state, pressing this key once brings up the last dialed number, and a second press sets up a call to this number.^[*] The menu method of performing this task is as follows:

1. Open the menu.

2. Scroll to the call register application.

3. Select this application.

4. Scroll to the dialed calls list.

5. Open the list.

The menu method typically requires about half a dozen presses on various keys, where the shortcut method assigned to the green key requires only two presses of one key. Think of the redial shortcut as a kind of history that the send key has collected about its usage. Pressing the key reveals information about how it was used the last time—and in fact a longer history of previous calls can be retrieved by scrolling the list. Thus, the key’s main function and the shortcut are related in an intuitively meaningful manner, which makes the shortcut understandable and easy to recall. Another essential shortcut is to give the user an access to the alphabetical list of saved names and numbers directly from idle screen by pressing scroll keys. Such lists should jump to the desired spot in the list when a user enters the name’s first letter on the number pad.

To let the adventurous feel the excitement of space navigation without the risk of really crashing into the moon, there is also a general numeric shortcut system to any applications submenu.. It works by pressing the menu softkey and immediately after that the number of an application in the applications menu, the number of the application’s first submenu, and so on. For example, keying the sequence menu–4–1 in a Series 30-style phone accesses the alarm clock. People are not supposed to know the numeric sequences to all features, but it is easy to memorize the sequences of the few features one uses daily.

^[*]It should be noted that there are variations in the shortcuts for certain products of certain cellular systems or market areas.