Arabella David's Blog

I'm still recovering from what has been an excellent Nokia World and Nokia Developer Summit in London this year!  Not only was it a delight to show off some of the great work the design folks have been doing at the design stand and in the design stream, it was great to meet a lot of developers that I've only previously met online face to face.  You know who you are :)  I was also thrilled to find out that we were in fact overbooked for the user experience evaluations!  Awesome.

Two weeks on, one part of the Nokia Developer Summit that really sticks in my head is the panel discussion we had with the audience and two developers that I've been working closely over the past year, Jim Brady of Earthcomber  and Iain Dendle of Shazam.  They were kind enough to share details of their applications and how they went through our user experience evaluations and user testing services.  

While their case studies are online, what was really nice for the audience in Nokia Developer Summit is that Iain and Jim described their individual experiences with our user experience (UX) services, as fielded some interesting questions from the developer audience, such as "how much do you guys take UX into account in your teams already?" (answers ranged from "we think we take it into account a lot, one designer in our team" to  "we thought we did... but we really didn't").  Another intriguing question was "How able are you to port the feedback from the UX services to other Certain Unnamed Non-Nokia Platforms?" and the answer was "we pretty much implemented all of the feedback across all of our platforms"- this last bit made the entire audience sit up and pay attention.  

Later I took a risk with Iain and Jim onstage, went off piste and asked them the completely open ended question of "Well.. what did you think?"

Iain responded with, "Consumers these days want a good user experience.  If they don't get one, they will say so quite vocally in the app store.  If you don't want your application to die immediately through bad reviews, you will invest in making sure you provide a good experience to them."

I then blurted out "Yep, the death of beta", which was an interesting thing to blurt out (especially when one is wired with a microphone), since that was instantly retweeted.  But the fact of the matter is, beta culture and beta releases don't really work in app stores.  With beta releases, there's an unspoken understanding that "yes, this will be buggy, but hopefully you can see through to the core of what we're building, and gosh we hope you like it"  

But with app stores and app releases directly to consumers, any feedback will be quick, dirty, and decisive- either "This is great!" or "This sux!".  Dang. Really now, is that really enough constructive criticism one way or the other to help you when considering improvements and future features for your application?

This is where the twin tools of the user experience evaluation and the user feedback services come in.  As I described to the audience at the Nokia Developer Summit, the User Experience Evaluation is when a design expert who knows your particular Nokia platform cold will spend at least a day walking through your app (maybe spending more time if it's a supercomplex app), and with this background, will make sure that it works well with style guidelines and conventions.  Usually they screenshot challenging areas and suggest better layouts or user flows.  

The user feedback service, which we're happy to be offering with our partner mob4hire, is a slightly different flavor of user experience refinement.  These guys who provide feedback are regular users, not design experts, and will give you a completely different flavor of advice.  Instead of the marketplace feedback of, "this sux!", this non-expert will give you more detailed, confidential user feedback like  "you know, you may not have realized it but having that bright red warning sign four screens into your app is kinda scary.  Did I do something wrong here, or what?" 

The way I think the developers would get the most out of both of these feedback variants we offer is if they use the UX evaluation first, midway through development, and then the user feedback when they're in their tweaking stage, just before release and want to apply polish.  I will say that both of these services cost money, but it's not really a lot (UX evaluations start at 500 and mob4hire can be as low as 100, depending on your parameters) and I personally think it's a good investment for you. 

Anyways, that's enough for now and I gotta get back to nursing this cold I picked up.  After that though, I'll be hopping around to different Developer Days around the world, where we'll be having more UX Evaluations at the events for free (almost forgot to mention that one- bring your app for a scheduled review and save 500 bucks!). 

If you happen to miss me or any of the other user experience folks at your local developer event, and if you're still curious about what this UX stuff is, we've put some info online for you here. 

When helping developers refine their applications, one thing I run into again and again is the fact that folks tend to get a bit inside their own heads too much when iterating their concepts out; sometimes to the point of breaking the user journey and potentially frustrating the end user.  Sometimes it takes a fresh set of eyes to double check if the app is really doing its best to help users accomplish what they want to accomplish. 

The User Experience Evaluation crew has been really good at spotting potential breaks in flow, narrowing down if it can be solved on a visual or interaction basis, and recommending steps to get the user journey back on track.  With applications including Tunewiki, Speedhero and others, we've been working with many development teams with varying UX knowledge levels to raise the quality of their apps, so theat when they hit the Ovi store, they're in the best position possible for a high adoption rate.  The UX evaluation, coupled with testing in a usability lab, has really opened people's eyes to the potentialities and usefulness of always running the app by a fresh sets of eyes - both expert and everyday users.

Curious to read more?  There's a few illustrative stories that we just put online.  You may also notice that we've recently launched a cooperation with Mob4Hire.  If you're interested in having users on the internet objectively try out your app before releasing it into the world, you may want to check them out.    

So we've put the new Design Gallery online and I really hope you like it. 

A few of the things that we've added to the showcase are the ability to sort applications via platform, alphabetically, region or time period, so if you're looking for good design examples along specific parameters it should be a lot easier to navigate.  I'm also trying to update it with fresh new apps more often, so you always go there to see what's currently hot.  

Let me know what you think either as a comment here, or on the discussion boards!  Likewise, if you've seen an app that you think has really good design/user experience, do ping!

Arabella

Today I have a bit of an excuse for not updating in a little while - I've been in cahoots with Quim Gil and a lot of the other folks in maemo and we're planning a really productive time for those of you that are making applications for the N900!

If you're even remotely in the area and/or are interested, we're cooking up what we're calling a User Experience Meets Code long weekend, where we'll have a bunch of UX specialists on hand to make your application work as well as possible on the N900.  Because we think Helsinki in winter probably isn't the most appealing place for people to fly out to, we're doing this in the warmer climes of Barcelona.

The general idea is to have one day for each of the bigger topics of user experience, like Concepting, Usability and Graphics, and then devote a day to each of them, where we give you a quick crash course on what it means for mobile.  Then we dive into specific applications, whether it be yours, or helping to fix someone else's, and hopefully learning something in the process.    

I hope it sounds interesting - if this is a hit, I really want to do this with more platforms, devices and cities in the future! 

I'll be the first to admit I've been absolutely terrible at updating this blog, and only marginally better at updating my twitter stream (feel free to add me, but if my history is any indication, there won't be a torrent of tweets arriving into your stream from me!). 

However, after meeting some of the great folks last week in London during Over the Air, I'm feeling really motivated to try to post more in the future about what's happening and what I've got in store for you all regarding User Experience and Design resources.  

First off, if you missed my talk in London last Friday, you can find my slides over on Slideshare. Thanks again to all of you that showed up and participated in discussion - it was extremely interesting and enlightening!

The gist of my talk was this.  I advocate a User Experience driven method of service creation. User experience as applied to mobile service development can be simultaneously a very vague, diffuse "feeling"  ("make sure the user is emotionally engaged with the service"), and incredibly nitpicky ("the startup screen must load within 30 ms").  When one is coming from a development background and has little to no formal user experience or design background, it can be a little overwhelming.  But it's all much clearer when you just put the end user's needs and wises first; once you do this, your scope and planning become so much more clearer, and the risk of having a service that doesn't deliver becomes that much smaller.  

With this kind of UX-driven process in mind, I'm trying to pull together the right resources to help you get started with your development concepting, planning and testing - looking at how a usual UX driven development cycle might go, and then supplying the right tools and resources at the right points when you need them.

I'm really open to suggestions if you have any - feel free to send me a tweet at @darabella or reply to this post if you know of something that might be helpful to you.  For example, a couple of developers mentioned they use Firebug extensively in web work, and having a stronger link between working with Firebug and Nokia browsers would be really helpful.  Or what they really needed for good application planning was a really good visual prototyping tool.  In regards to these and whatever else you've got, I will definitely see what I can do!

Thanks again to Dan, Margaret and the rest of the Over the Air organizers for putting together such an awesome event.  I'm still feeling sad I couldn't take home a giant beanbag!  

Finally, a big thanks to Tina, Sumppi and the rest of the Eat.fi gang for letting me use their journey from desktop to mobile as a case study.  Good luck in the SIME awards you guys!  

So in case you haven't noticed, there's some fresh content we just added to the Design & User Experience Library regarding Web Runtime.  I think it's chock-full of some really useful information from a design standpoint - such as issues including styling and differing interaction models - that when incorporated into the development process, helps to create a great widget.

There's even a quick checklist at the end you can run through if you want to make sure you've doing the most you can to ensure a great user experience

It's really fantastic to find people passionate about creating aesthetically pleasing yet functional mobile design; it's even more wonderful when a bunch of them get together under one roof to talk about how to make things even better!

If you're anywhere near London on the evening of the 23rd of February and interested in what others are doing in regards to mobile design, then check out the Mobile Design UK event that's happening at the RSA. Don't forget to sign up first - there's only room for 50 people and it already seems to be getting filled up!

Also, if you hear about any other things like this happening in the world, I'd love it if you could send me a note with the info - I'm actively on the lookout for more events like these and I'm sure they're out there somewhere waiting to be discovered.

When it comes to mobile and website design, there is no one guide to rule them all; every region has its own distinct approach and personality.  

An online article regarding design in China was recently published here on Forum Nokia, and in the future we'll be rolling out future articles focused on different regions and the local flavour of design and how it impacts on content and applications.   

What I'd like to know is, what do you think of it?  Do you find it helpful, or is there additional information that you wish you could have found there?  It would be great to get some feedback to incorporate into the next regionally focused article that comes out.   

Perhaps a blog here on Forum Nokia is a good way to introduce myself.  My name's Arabella, and I'm here to do what I can to help provide resources and information intended for designers (visual and interaction) regarding mobile applications and content.  I'll be posting information relating to these activities here on this blog, and also doing what I can to contribute to the creation of well-crafted applications and content for mobile devices. 

Right now there's a few things here on Forum Nokia available that relate to design for mobile devices, such as a the Mobile Design Showcase and some really great introductory information regarding Visual Design for Mobile Devices, and there's a lot more to come in the future.  I hope you like it and gain something from these resources you haven't learned before.  If not, do you have any requests or a wish list in regards to mobile design?  Feel free to let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Arabella