Nokia email – a closer look with the creators

BOSTON, USA – Earlier this week I got to chat to Andrew Mahon, the man heading up Nokia Email and currently steering it through it’s early days as a beta application. Keen to highlight a vision of simplicity, and the way Nokia Email is pushing to overcome general hurdles relating to mobile email – lack of awareness and difficulty of set-up – Mahon went on to talk about the application in more depth, and where focus has been placed to ensure we’re met with the best possible user experience when it finally launches.

In terms of research and what the team has learned, Mahon breaks it down simply with regards to what we generally look for and how we behave with email on the move. And it’s this structure that has gone on to influence the layout of the Nokia Email client.

“The highest value of email that people seem to appreciate and behave around is simply notification. The phone makes a noise, you know there’s an email, you like to be kept up to date, and it doesn’t even mean you’re going to read the email. The second one is what I’d call mailbox management. One of the things we’ve learned is that people are deleting all of the dross, so when they get back to their desk, now they’re working with their real email, the ones that need time to compose a reply.”

These two points have been addressed via the slick new animated interface, which alerts you clearly and scan your incoming mail quickly and efficiently as Mahon explains:

“The email client has got some eye candy making it easy to navigate, with attractive use of space and icons. As you scroll through your inbox, you can read a portion of the first line of any email, it expanding as you go through each one. You can also select a whole lot of emails and manage them.”

Then Mahon expains that reading an email is the third priority, which has been dealt with via a much clearer viewing pane, with replying to an email being the fourth most important action, and composing an email from scratch coming in last. Granted, this breakdown of our behavior with mobile email isn’t a complete mystery, nonetheless it does resonate with most of us, and more importantly its interesting to see that the team is structuring its focus on creating an email experience that echoes our general needs.

Still some time from breaking free of its beta status, Nokia Email is one of the most dynamic and significant apps currently in the pipeline and we’ll be keeping close tabs on it throughout its gestation period. If you’ve had a chance to use it, let us know what you think in the comments section below.

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Tags | Andrew Mahon, conversations, Nokia, Nokia Email