Marketing the Product

Our salesforce was used to the Nokia 2110 and they liked it; the product was easy to use and sold in great volumes. So there were yet more people to convince of the superiority of Navi-key UI over previous Nokia user interfaces. We wanted to demonstrate that Navi-key was better not only than Nokia 2110 but also than the competing products. We concocted a test to be conducted in a London train station, where we randomly selected people carrying mobile phones and asked them to perform the tasks of saving, finding, calling, and deleting a name and number. We used the Nokia 2110, the participants' own phones, and the Navi-key prototype (Figure 3.4). The Navi-key phone turned out to be the easiest to use, even easier than the phones people were accustomed to using. This result was so encouraging that it almost seemed fabricated-it was not. We genuinely had managed to make an easy-to-use digital mobile phone. The results were never used in external marketing.

click to expand
Figure 3.4: The test comparing the Navi-key UI 3110, the 2110i benchmark for ease of use, and the user's own current phone. The 3110 Navi-key phone scored as a clear preference in terms of overall ease of use.

Eventually the Navi-key concept was selected for the Nokia 5110, which was launched a year after the Nokia 3110. Second-generation Navi-key UI was different from its predecessor in one respect-the C key was now a backstep key, taking the user one level back in the menu, instead of an exit key taking the user to idle mode. We thought that a user interface without a panic key in the form of exit is flawed, and we had endless discussions about this issue. In the end we discovered that novices indeed preferred the exit option, but only for a little while. Once they became more familiar with the phone, they started to value the ability to skip one level in the menu. We learned that a user interface has to have a logical way out, but not necessarily a panic exit.

The hardest things to do with a mobile phone user interface include multiparty calling, call waiting, and other advanced in-call operations. The enthusiast could experiment with the different Navi-key UI versions-Nokia models 3110, 5110, and 3210-to find that they are all different. Handling two calls simultaneously means that you need three keys to be available on equal priority. You need to be able to end the current call and answer or reject the waiting call. When you have two simultaneous calls-one active and one on hold-you need to be able to end the active call and switch to the call on hold. Initially we decided not to implement this supplementary feature at all, because we deemed it too difficult to use with the simple Navi-key UI. The nonsolution, however, proved to be a nonoption, as Nokia's operator customers clamored for multicall handling because it is a great source of revenue. Usability problems were not, however, sufficient to discourage us from implementing this capability.

The use case we optimized for was called 'the human answering machine.' This means that the existing conversation has priority, but it can be interrupted for answering the second call. The user is offered an 'answer' option on the softkey. On pressing the key, the first call is put on hold, and the user can give a personal live greeting to the second caller, such as: 'Hi, I will be on a call for 15 minutes; I will call you back.' On the second press of the softkey the user would end the incoming call and return to the first call. This worked very well in Europe, but in the United States, users prefer that neither call be prioritized. United States users insist on the ability to continue either call. This forced us into having 'options' as the softkey command during calls, which made the entire process one layer more complicated. If we had known how important this feature would be in the United States and how much hassle it would cause us, we might have trashed the entire Navi-key concept.

Why has Navi-key been so successful? There are five unique qualities in it.

  1. Its key count is lower than the competition's, even though the difference is only two keys compared to Nokia Series 30. Apart from the number of keys, their nature and their logical positioning on the phone create a distinctively different keypad, which people seem to notice.

  2. The initial perceived ease of use really delivers on its promise. Its thoroughgoing consistency stimulates learning. At first you learn one or two features by rote, and after a while you can deduce how the rest works yourself.

  3. The Navi-key user interface has proved to be very flexible for adding new features without hitting the usability knee (see Chapter 1).

  4. We have noticed that it is difficult to create bad feature design for Navi-key. As complexity increases, the way to design for Navi-key is to put the new commands into an options list and then sort the list into a meaningful order.

  5. Finally, the softkey itself, with its printed blue line and chang- ing screen label, adds an element of mystery. The users have described the key as being intelligent: 'It somehow guesses my next actions'; 'It tells me what to do next'; and so on. Our marketing people seized on this element of mystery and dubbed it the 'Navi-key.' This name has since become synonymous with ease of use, and other Nokia products have leveraged it as a usabil- ity trademark. Some people responsible for Nokia brand have claimed that the Navi-key is one of the most valuable subbrands we have.

Navi-key has surprised us time after time with its versatility. It has managed to evolve as new features have been added. Many thought it would be a disaster for browsing, but our experience was that a single softkey serving an options menu in a third-party service actually tends to harmonize the services and lowers the barrier for usage. Obviously efficiency will never equal a dedicated select key concept, but it holds up as acceptable. The key problem with browsing is not the keypad, but the size of the display.

Today the biggest threat to the Navi-key style is the number-not the type-of features that have to be implemented. It will be very interesting to see how the industry evolves: whether there will continue to be a market for a good plain old telephone or whether they will be replaced with sophisticated browser phones. Our bet is that the market will continue to segment and customers will acquire a more nuanced concept of 'phone' by stages. A phone is no longer a phone, just as there is no longer a screwdriver, but only a multitude of different tools with slightly different objectives.



Mobile Usability(c) How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone
Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone
ISBN: 0071385142
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 142

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