Chapter 6: Managing the Design of User Interfaces

Overview

Christian Lindholm and Turkka Keinonen

Nokia has been strategically managing the design of mobile phone user interfaces since the early 1990s. Design methods, tools, and training approaches have been developed continuously, and numerous gadgets and simulations have been evaluated in our labs with varying success.

The UI management teams at Nokia have learned to operate in an extremely dynamic and independent environment with sometimes conflicting expectations. The rapid technological development in mobile communications has influenced mobile device usability a lot. To get a sense of what this means, one needs only to look at the advances in LCD technology as it has transitioned from character displays to dot-matrix displays and now into active-matrix color displays, all in less than 7 years (at the time of writing).

Since mobile products have to be small, it is often not possible to reuse ideas directly from the desktop UI world. Small user interfaces do not scale seems to be one of the natural laws governing our work. The mobile is a totally different medium from the desktop PC. Among our customers is a new, very capable generation of young users who are totally at ease watching MTV and playing on their PlayStation at the same time. Satisfying both these 'screenagers' and the demands of the maturing population is a real challenge.

Since the mid 1990s, Nokia's strategies have been driven by three different organizations: product marketing, concept creation, and R&D (research and development). We have searched for the 'right' model of organizing UI design activities, and we have found that each solution has inherent benefits and deficiencies.

Under product marketing, UI strategy development aimed at setting the vision, strategy, and roadmap for designing user interfaces. Documenting these results into requirements and communicating them to R&D were its daily tasks. The allocation of responsibilities between product marketing and R&D resembled the familiar relationship between customer and supplier, which eliminated some of the communication problems existing between different experts. Another benefit of having product marketing take the lead in strategic UI development was that the top management could directly influence the UI strategy.

Concept creation's approach to UI management was to stimulate and sharpen the vision, and then build a strategy to implement it. Nokia decided to set up a small Product Concept Group responsible for advancing the product concept, forming a kind of 'think tank' or, more evocatively in Finnish, an 'idea furnace.' Most of the experts in this group came from the research side. Its first challenge was that the gap between reality and vision became too wide-the urgent reality machine of schedules and resource allocations was missing. The second challenge was territorialism: people started to think that the group automatically had a monopoly on good ideas and all the others were inferior.

For its part, Nokia R&D set up a global cross-functional group of user interface experts called the User Interaction Group (UIG). It enlisted all user interface designers throughout the corporation. There were six different disciplines in the UIG specification:

• Interaction design

• Localization

• Graphic design

• User interface platform (the team responsible for strategy, roadmapping, and requirement gathering)

• Sound design

• Usability

The benefit of this cross-disciplinary organization was that it united the UI designers from different locations and backgrounds to create easy-to-use products, and communication within the global group was excellent. Problems arose, however, in communicating with implementation and product marketing. The UIG was seen as the third leg in product creation, and three was too many. The UIG organization was too far from product planning and, even though technically in R&D, still not aligned with implementation. The mandate of the UIG was to ensure that an interface was easy to use, not that it was easy to make. In the end, the UIG served as a 'university of UI design' during Nokia's intensive growth phase. The fact that the user interface people sat down together allowed them to learn quickly from each other.

Through these different approaches to managing UI design we have learned by doing. Our experience has given us a pack of tools to be applied in managing UI development in an innovative expert organization. Some of the most essential tools are introduced in the following paragraphs.