Documentation Management

Tacit information is a stimulator for innovation. The fewer rules and conventions there are, the fewer restrictions for designers. With every frozen practice and fixed design guideline, an element of creativity disappears. Knowing that, we’ve been reluctant to document the Nokia user interface style, relying instead on tacit guidelines as long as possible. The tacit guideline is an implicit agreement about the look and feel of Nokia user interfaces, used to channel new design in the proper direction. Although it is sometimes criticized as being a synonym for “my manager doesn’t like my design,” it is more than that. It is more than a subjective opinion. A tacit guideline has a life of its own. It can be passed on as the responsible people change. It can be adapted, developed, and kept fresh. Even though Nokia is very engineering-focused and process-oriented, we did not document our core user interface guidelines until intense growth phase of Nokia. Gradually it became evident that the senior UI designers kept on answering the same basic questions. At that point, two senior designers, Johanna Järnström and Seppo Helle, gathered the principles together and gave them explicit expression.

The UI design guidelines are now like a mooring buoy in a natural harbor, saying that this cannot be taken away; we have learned something. We have a heritage. The fact that we have written guidelines has not changed our behavior. There is still a tacit thing called “Nokia style,” and we think there always will be as a part of our culture.

The scope of UI documentation is naturally much wider than the design guidelines alone. Our UI documentation has a top-down layered structure. The highest-level document governing what we aim at is a “user interface vision and strategy.” It covers major customer trends, technology progress and breakthroughs occurring outside the company, and the behavior of related industries before eventually setting forth what we wish to achieve, what actions we will take, and the schedules we will meet. (We call the latter a UI roadmap.)

One level of iteration from the roadmap, we find the UI portfolio, which describes key characteristics of each UI style (see Chapter 1). The next level of documentation is a style-specific style guide, such as the Series 40 or Series 60 style guide. These style guides describe the core functionality of the most important applications. They illustrate layouts and suggest how to design applications for the given style. The style guide naturally cannot answer all possible questions about applying the style. To reveal what the guideline does not know, we have nominated UI designers to act as the style “owners,” whose job is to take the lead in style evolution and to assist in applying the style to new products or applications.

In product development projects, style guides are used to create UI specifications. These are very detailed documents defining the user interaction with a specific phone application or functionality. A UI specification is split into a common part, which is shared by all phones using the same style; and a product-specific part. UI specifications for a contemporary phone can be well over a thousand pages and written by tens of people. Fortunately we do not need to rewrite everything for each phone model. We can reuse all the common parts and thus speed up development and build more consistent user experiences. By reusing the common UI design, a new product variant can be designed in roughly one-third of the time and with one-third of the designers that were needed in creating the initial design.

To summarize, Nokia user interface documentation is a construct made out of

• The Nokia UI design guidelines explicating the Nokia user interface design heritage

• UI vision and strategy presenting a roadmap of product and style development

• UI style portfolio cataloging the UI styles that are at the disposal of product development projects

• UI style guidelines defining individual UI styles

• UI specifications defining the user interaction with an individual application down to the smallest detail