Team Management

The Nokia UI design culture and way of working could be described as an individualistic network-based expert organization. This means that it is commonplace to assign the most suitable person to the task rather than take the task to the most suitable organization. This works because we constantly create and destroy the organization, leaving only the people and processes in which competence resides. And as processes are merely work methods, that leaves us with people.

Assembling the right team for a project is always a challenge. The bigger the team, the more likely it will avoid mistakes related to missing skills and perspectives, but size comes at the expense of speed. Hence the design manager usually has to balance reliability versus efficiency. Three-person teams are fantastic for fluent cooperation, and a really experienced team of three experts can create a whole product concept. Teams of five or fewer people still function well, but in our experience the adage that five people are a team and seven are a committee seems to hold true. Committees are no good for design purposes.

Favoring speed in design team assembly greatly stresses the individual designers and their skills. A three-person user interface creation team needs an interaction designer, a graphic designer, and a marketing representative. The interaction designer is usually responsible for conceiving the dialogue and for the necessary technical knowledge and simulation; the graphic designer turns the dialogue into screen designs, and the marketer identifies the customers, including their needs and their market segments. In this team there are no redundancies, but it is short of two important competencies: software implementation and localization. Experts in these disciplines must therefore be consulted on an ad hoc basis during the design process, or at least at agreed milestones. If the objective is to design a total product concept with a novel physical form and appearance, an industrial designer should join the team.

Team spirit has a major impact on the outcome. When team dynamics are harmonious and the team members know each other, then a bonding of mutual respect appears, assumptions coalesce, and ideas get reviewed and evolve at the speed of thought. To maintain the right creative and productive spirit, all members have to be contributing, and every team member needs to count on others' contribution. No free rides-only active contributors may hang around. Team spirit is enhanced by the perceived importance of the work the team does. Designers like their work to be seen. At intervals, appropriate responses to the team's achievements are important to the design team's confidence and momentum. This can be ensured by regular reviews and presentations to management.

Nokia's user interface style creation projects, particularly the ones for the high-end concepts like the Series 60 smart phone style and the Series 80 communicator UI, have been extensive efforts right from initial concept creation through prototyping, localization, and evaluation with world tours, all the way through to software implementation. Working for 4 to 5 years on the same project is a long time to maintain vision, interest, and focus, but that is the time it takes to do a completely new high-end UI style. During long-running projects it is often the case that the design team changes design midway-even several times, and this is likely to affect the consistency of the design. Perhaps the reason for allowing the change has something to do with designers' personal characteristics. The nature of development changes as projects proceed, and some people are better at kicking new things off than completing them. For these people the boredom after the major decisions have been made might be a reason to lose their motivation. Luckily there are others who enjoy striving for details. According to our experience, the takeover may not occur without hiccups. The most important thing is to ensure that the whole concept team does not withdraw at the same time, but that some members continue as consultants to the implementation part of the project. What also helps in these transitions is good documentation. In the case of Series 60 we had a very advanced PC-based simulation. At the time of launching the first Series 60 phone, anyone looking at the simulation and the actual software could tell that they were strikingly similar. Another source of help is a comprehensive UI style guide.

Nokia has recruited with very open minds. In the Nokia human factors community we have sociologists, engineers, audio experts, linguists, anthropologists, graphic designers, mathematicians, and economists. What they share is that all are working within the bounds of their own fields on the same project, and all are interested in exploring new ground. However, this breadth of competencies may create communication problems. To overcome these, Nokia has established procedures and working practices, and created mobile UI jargon that is used internally. These processes are the backbone of our work and therefore have to be constantly tuned and improved.

The concept creation competition is one such process. Vision-driven concept creation leaves much of the project outcome to the skills and creativity of the design teams. Whenever possible, it is advisable to create several competing concepts. Following a number of promising paths for a while will increase the likelihood of finding the right design. Instead of asking one team to propose several solutions, it is better to run a number of teams in parallel-typically two to six-cracking the same task. The friendly contest creates some tension to sharpen the mind, and produces better innovations.

Besides creating design alternatives, a design competition may help identify the most suitable team to continue the project. Competing concepts are realized within very tight schedules. The time constraint is important to ensure that no one involved becomes so attached to one design that he or she can't jump on board and work toward another that happens to be selected for further development. The concepts can be changed, but not the individual designers.

In a competition review the teams receive direct feedback from user interface design management, and each team is encouraged to express their opinions for and against other concepts. In this phase it is important to focus on core issues such as number of keys, type of keys, size of display, navigation model, and the layouts of core applications. Much of the detailed interaction can be engineered later. Sometimes external agencies have participated in Nokia's UI competitions. The biggest disappointments in those cases have occurred when the ratio between 'icing' and 'cake' has been reversed. It seems that for novice designers it is easier to do good-looking than well-working designs. The longer the experience of the designer, in fact, the more plain and stripped-down the concepts become. As long as the windowing calculations are correct, UI graphics can be added later.

The hard part of UI concept competitions is judging. Actually a winner is seldom declared, and no prize is given-unless you consider it a prize to be able to continue work on the concept toward a real product rather than letting it end up as just another layer of technosediment in the cabinet. Such competitions rarely result in one uniquely superior concept, but typically all concepts have some excellent characteristics and some unacceptable solutions. The reason for this is the lack of time needed to polish the concepts.

Conducting a design competition will add time to the process of conceptualizing a product. As a rule of thumb, two concepts take 50 percent more time and three take 100 percent more time than working with a single one. The increments come from consolidation. Usually, one concept is selected as the basis of the project and then the designers identify elements from the other concepts that will be incorporated into it. From then on the project becomes straightforward design work.