If you are lucky, you can be in charge of a design project where many fundamental areas of the UI will need to be changed compared to the old products. For example, in mobile devices or any embedded (non-PC) software, you may need to design both the hardware and software UI at the same time. In such projects you may be tempted to change everything.

However, think about the consumers or customers you are designing for. If they will see no familiarity in the product whatsoever, you need to practically educate them again to the new usage conventions, mental models, etc. With good design you can ease this threshold, but it still requires a lot from the users. Think of mobile phones: about three billion people in the world know how to switch a mobile phone on and off. It requires a long press of the power button. It is not particularly intuitive: you just need to know that a short press won’t be enough. Or about one billion people know that when their mobile phone is on, pressing briefly the power button will show the menu for ringing tone profiles. What if you would need to invest, say 1 € for each of the three billion users to re-educate them that power button will work differently? That would be a costly change in the UI!

So think of what your customers already know about your UI as an asset that you need to take care of. It’s not unlike the value associated with your brand. Use it, cash out by using the same conventions, but also carefully accumulate new funds by educating them about something new. Maybe you can share some of this with other companies in the same market, through standards or simply copying with pride.

Understanding your user base as an asset will make your work easier. It’s a relief that you don’t actually need to – or actually must not – redesign everything. Once again, select where you invest your time. Create radical innovation in the UIs in those areas of your product where it truly brings value. For a mobile phone company, for example, innovating extremely fluent UIs for novel social communication features makes a lot of sense, but redesigning the keypad layout probably doesn’t.

Remember, that you also don’t need to change everything in one go. It is much smarter to leave some for the next products. Introduce new things gradually. Plan the renewal using a roadmap. This will ensure that your users will grow with you.

Defining the mobile phone

I have been working with mobile user experience for over 16 years. During this time, the profession of designing for good user experience has changed surprisingly little. In early 1990s, the forerunners of UX (the name and acronym were invented much later) had already a very good understanding of what UX is all about. In the CHI conference in 1993, IDEO held a full-day tutorial in using personas (then called “characters”) and scenarios in design process to ensure that users and consumers are taken into account in the process and that the result is both useful, usable and enjoyable. If you thought Alan Cooper was there first…

Naturally, this level of skill and understanding was rare. I would claim that Nokia was one the first telecom companies that took the user interfaces and consumers seriously. It wasn’t so much of management decision but driven by individuals that had the vision that mobile phones should be enjoyable and usable for everyone. In mid-90s, Nokia’s UI competence was best in the industry. Nokia defined the de-facto standard for user interfaces of mobile phones, with menus, soft keys , etc. The same principle and elements are still used in majority of mobile phones. For me, this is by far the most influential user interface design of digital products so far. Basic mobile phones is used by 3 billion people (compare to PCs that are used by one billion).

Searching for hardware innovation

Towards the end of 1990s, it was evident that competition was catching up. The UI paradigm of menus and soft keys was relatively easy to copy. The usability of mobile phones of other manufacturers weren’t necessarily as optimised and polished as Nokia’s, but it was already quite difficult for a layman to tell the difference. The competition catching up, Nokia needed to innovate again. As a hardware company, Nokia was primarily trying to innovate in the area of physical product design. Nokia’s shelves are full of product and user interface prototypes from this era: product concepts for novel form factors for mobile phones, new product ideas for home, car, for sports, etc. Interestingly, none of these were truly successful. Perhaps the success of mobile phones set the bar for innovation very high: anything that didn’t have as much market potential as phones were rejected. It simply paid off better to optimise the mobile phone business.

For user experience practitioners, this was both very interesting but also disappointing period. It was a great challenge to innovate new physical products for everyday use. Nokia had brilliant designers and a solid process for understanding user needs, innovating concepts, prototyping and evaluation. But when very few or none of the concepts were taken into productization, there were never the gratifying moments of seeing the concepts in consumers hands.

Platformization

When the mobile phone business had proven to be the most successful for Nokia, the company optimized this so that it became one of the most profitable businesses in the world. As mobile phones were commodity, the manufacturer that could provide the largest variety of phones most efficiently was the winner. Nokia enjoyed for quite a while, and in some markets it still does, the virtuous circle where consumers bought devices that filled the shelves in the retail stores, and retailers therefore wanted to shelf Nokia because they were selling so well.

User experience practitioners were also part of this optimisation. The largest UI design teams were in the UI platforms, such as S40 and S60. They carefully designed platforms that can be embedded in a large variety of marginally different devices. There was not necessarily much room for innovation, but on the other hand, improving a small detail in the software UI meant that this improvement would be shared with tens or hundreds of millions of consumers. A small usability improvement could mean a vast improvement in the lives of people on earth in total!

Mobile phone user interface hardware (buttons, mainly) were also relatively standard. The software defined which buttons there simply must be in the device: navigation keys (up, down, left, right), soft keys, number keys, etc. The soft keys must be placed near the display, number keys together etc. This left quite little room in the physical design to innovate on the user interfaces. The biggest impact of UX in this front was to fine-tune, optimize and standardize the physical UI. This meant that nobody needed to spend extra time in thinking where the volume keys should go, what kind of media buttons (play/pause, prev, next) should be used, where’s the most ergonomic position for a camera key, and so on. Consistency helps consumers feel comfortable when they buy their next phone. This also contributed to the efficiency of the organization: there was no need to reiterate with the UI hardware design.

Searching for software innovation

With stable hardware and software platforms, creating new mobile phone models is very efficient. Small variations and optimization in the physical design and a new release of the platform software with the standard UI created products that were fairly similar to each other. The main visible differences were related to the shape, colors and materials of the devices. Sliding, folding, twisting and turning form factors. Plastic, rubber, steel, gold.  And all the possible colors of the rainbow.

The user interface of the platforms were standard. Still, some quite remarkable changes took place during this period. New features that are the key enablers for the future generations of mobile devices emerged: high-speed connectivity, WLAN, internet browsing, and services running both on the device and in the server. (Nokia Sports Tracker is my favorite example.)

But adding everything on top of the old platforms created increasingly complex user interfaces. Just like the frog in the heating water kettle, the mobile phone industry couldn’t itself notice that it was creating devices that were increasingly difficult to use and that the new – some really good – feature couldn’t be found among all the old ones.

It required someone outside the traditional mobile phone industry to shake the industry out of this.

Redefining mobile phone

Apple’s iPhone started the redefinition of the mobile phone. Until then, despite the emerging features, for the majority of people, mobile phones were just … phones. This product demonstrated that everyone can surf the net, or anybody can install new applications that have nothing to do with calling on the phone. It made the new features very easy and enjoyable to use. And people loved it.

In a very short time, the perception of mobile phones changed dramatically. Apple’s iPhone was not technically the most advanced product out there, but through product innovation in both the physical (full touch screen) and in software (beautiful and responsive UI), it certainly was a landmark in the history of mobile phones. It did a huge favor for the whole industry. All other manufacturers were challenged to think again, leave the stagnated efficiency optimized platform game.

Currently we are living a really fascinating period in the mobile phone industry. All manufacturers and internet companies are trying to beat each other with better and different new concepts. Will the winner be a mini-laptop or a small pocketable device? Will it run Android, OS X, Maemo, or Windows? Will the services be called Ovi, Google, MSN or MobileMe?

As always, the best of these will survive, and start forming new de facto standards for the mobile phones – or should we already say mobile devices. For the user experience professionals this is the time of golden opportunities. There are so many companies and projects wanting to be the next leader in this area. User experience designers that create the most innovative and appealing solutions will be defining the iconic user interfaces for the next decade or two.

Main image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/miikas/

If you work as a design lead, you very likely need to write a list of design drivers that you want to achieve. And ultimately, you are responsible for all the decisions that lead to designs that fulfill these drivers. The design drivers must be shared and understood by the design team, but in particular you have to understand them first. If you don’t know where the design should be going, you’re doomed. I’m not going into the process of finding the drivers. There are lots of processes for that. Sometimes most drivers are simply handed down to you.

Expressing design drivers early in the project can be difficult. You may just have a hunch what you are looking for. If you, for example, want to create a user interface that feels like magic, it can be difficult to describe what that means until you see some examples of designs that match your intent. When you find that, instead of verbal descriptions you can show to the team what you mean. During the process, showing rather than telling what you are aiming at will create a shared and profound understanding of the design driver that could otherwise be hard to express. Perhaps, at the end of the process, you can rewrite the design drivers with much better accuracy.

Following design drivers consistently is one of the primary means for demonstrating design leadership. If you are decisive, confident and consistent with your decisions, the whole team will feel confident about the project and drive to the same direction. A design lead should never say “I don’t know”. You just have to make a decision when one is needed. Note that requesting more exploration on a topic is just fine – it may be that you just haven’t seen a good enough solution yet.

Main image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/ralf_herrmann/

The introduction of iPhone has shaken the traditional telecom industry, and now all the elements of the user experience of mobile devices are being redesigned, including the dominant form factors, interaction paradigms, software platforms, and leading services.

During the last two years, I was leading a sizable user interface concepting projects that contribute to this industrywide redefinition process. In such a project, we need to question everything. Nothing that we have had so far can be taken as granted: anything can and must be reconsidered. UX designers that are used to working in the PC environment or in Web have always had relatively stable UI hardware to count on. Often as well the operating system is well defined, documented and design guidelines are available. What happens when nothing of this is there? When you have to design all of this in the same project: UI hardware, UI framework for the operating system, and then the applications? When you have to write the UI style guide? This is the most challenging type of project for a design leader. Nothing is stable, nothing to base decisions on.

In this series of blog posts I will write about my experiences as a lead designer in such a project. Unfortunately, for confidentiality reasons I cannot use any of the real designs as example, so bear with me that I am staying on somewhat an abstract level. I still hope that the findings are useful or at least entertaining to some of you who are interested in UX design leadership or as participants of challenging design projects.

I will touch at least the following areas:

• design direction: how to lead design work
• processes: how to organize design work
• design tools
• people: how to work with people in the design team
• you

Now we are ready for the first insight.