Design
Stepping behind the Nokia homescreen
By Mike on 27 May 2009
LONDON – We’re here at Nokia’s design event in London, The Inside Story, and user interface designers Juliana Ferreira and Lee Cooper have just given us an interesting look at what goes into designing Nokia homescreens, and highlight just how significant the homescreen is for most of us. Click through to find out what happens behind the scenes at Nokia for the designers exploring new ways to improve the homescreen interface.
Early on Juliana hit us with a monster statistic – of the total time you spend using your mobile phone, on average 85 per cent of that time is spent on your homescreen. Does that surprise you? I must say I never imagined it would be that much. Regardless, the fact remains that we spend a huge amount of time engaged with our homescreens. So the upcoming N97 is the first device to fully realize the research that has taken place over the past two years by Juliana, Lee and the other UI design specialists at Nokia, when it comes to creating a new breed of homescreen experience – an experience that reflects the now embedded trend of personalization and our desire to communicate, share media and control any extension of ourselves on our terms. Not just digitally either, with the likes of Nike iD (which lets you custom create your own trainers to your taste) quoted as an example. As Juliana explains:
“The homescreen appropriate way to personalize plethora of content that is meaningful to you. It allows people to make their products their own. We are building tools to enable people to make the products for themselves”
In terms of how the design team has approached investigating and developing Nokia’s new homescreens, including that of the N97, Juliana explains it’s a three-step process.
Firstly, the team keenly observed and gathered data on how people think about personalization in a number of counties including the UK, USA, China, Philippines, Brazil and India. These initial findings gave the design team insight into the global similarities and differences between people when it comes to personalization, culturally and beyond, spread around the globe. For instance, one granular finding was that a worker interviewed in the UK and a rural worker in Nigeria shared the same interest of wanting to get the football scores for the Premiere League delivered to them – different lives and cultures, but some fundamental shared needs. The job of the design team is to address these sorts of micro needs in a flexible and effortless way, with the overarching solution being widgets and wallpapers, and enabling people to fully customize them.
So the second step in the process of designing the new homescreen was the exploration of concepts and prototypes. The team asked hundreds of people to create their ideal homescreen with paper prototypes, and found that no two homescreens were the same and that people want complete freedom to place stuff wherever they wanted. Personalization in practice saw people feedback with some interesting requirements, such as one guy who simply said “I really don’t want to hide by daughter’s face with email”. Fair point.
Plus, people called for widgets that would morph in size to make them more contextually relevant and significant when appropriate (something that isn’t in the current homescreen, but is being looked at). For example one person in the study was a Manchester United fan who said, “for that 90 minutes the football is on, I want to see the Man. Utd. widget as clearly as I can. It should be big while the game is on and smaller when it’s not”
Corralling all this information and feedback led to the final stage of validation and testing of the homescreen to make it seamless and effortless. Which is the stage we find ourselves at with the N97.
As for what’s next? The design team is looking at ways to enable this tool for more Nokia devices. Also the ambition is to enable multiple homescreens on single device.
What do you think to what you’ve seen of the N97 homescreen? Is personalisation an essential element for your mobile life? Share your thoughts below.
Related posts:
- Behind the new Nokia homescreen – video update
- Exploring the Nokia N97 homescreen – video close-up
- Peek behind the curtain of Nokia’s design studio in London
Tags | Design, homescreen, Juliana Ferreira, N97, nokia n97, The Inside Story
May 27th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Nokia, if you value your loyal customers please add the N97’s homescreen to a future firmware update for the 5800xm.
There are no hardware limitations preventing it so please do the right thing and let us 5800xm owners have it!
The 5800xm’s contact bar sucks because you cannot see the calendar entries whilst using it. We need the application shortcuts and the contact bar and the calendar like you get on the N97.
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muzamil Reply:
September 26th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
yes its true nokia 5800 should have the sowtare like personalizing homescreen on n97 .yeah i am wid u they should create software for 5800 also as early as possible
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May 27th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
This is a great piece, but I’d totally like to see more conversatsions of this type (the development process, statistics and metrics that go into some design/marketing decisions, etc.). That would be the kind of thing that would add some more value into the content here.
But back on topic, I wonder why context-relevant homescreens weren’t done right from the outset. It would seem to me that such a matter would be the ideal homescreen across all of those stated areas of usage and attention from users (and carriers).
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May 27th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
I’m extremely excited about the homescreen widgets. I really hope someone creates a sports scores ticker from the beginning so I can glance and my phone and stay updated with the game.
Like ARJWright said, I wonder why this wasn’t done sooner.
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May 27th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
Flyscreen has much better execution than this, it’s real widgets on your standby screen, much more useful.
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May 28th, 2009 at 8:00 am
Don’t like the idea of the widgets changing shape on thier own. If I turn on my phone and the homescreen is changing (even slightly) every few hours, that’s going to disorientate me.
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May 29th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Does any nokia mobile model have a feature by which it can reject sms/calls from numbers which are not on the contact list? You see I am bothered by spam but I don’t want to switch it to silent mode, I want it to intelligently detect which call/sms to reject and which to record.
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Narsi Reply:
September 1st, 2009 at 2:06 pm
You can try easyreject. its an app that allows you to filter spam sms/calls using numbers/key words.
of course this means that you would need to receive a spam SMS/call once from a sender before you can bar them. but still, it works. i dont know how much i would trust my phone to “intelligently” screen calls for me. you might end up missing some important calls that got filtered out as spam.
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dd Reply:
September 7th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Thank you very much for your reply.
“this means that you would need to receive a spam SMS/call once from a sender before you can bar them.”
this is a problem as I get spam from mostly new numbers the numbers are so far never repeated.
“i dont know how much i would trust my phone to “intelligently” screen calls for me. you might end up missing some important calls that got filtered out as spam.”
This is simple. I only want the phone to allow calls/sms from numbers on my contact list. I am not much bothered about losing “important” calls from unknown people. They can send me an email. I am more lenient about spam in my email as it doesn’t wake me up or otherwise disturb me when I am doing something else.
Thank you again.
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June 3rd, 2009 at 3:00 pm
I don’t know where that statistic regarding the amount of time spent on the homescreen comes from. It simply doesn’t ring true to me, and simply cannot be accurate with regard to smartphones – the scant few seconds my phone is displaying its homescreen are virtually insignificant compared to the many hours I have Kindle or Facebook or Twitterific or Mail or the web browser open on it.
But if it’s anything close to accurate it represents a massive failure on the part of mobile UI designers…with only one out that I can think of*. What this statistic implies is that by far most of the time people spend on their devices is squandered in trying to figure out how to do something, rather than simply doing it. That’s unacceptable by any standard, but most particularly in the circumstances of everyday urgency and pressure that attend much mobile use. We can, should and need to be doing better.
*The sole exception case is when the homescreen itself displays the desired content, e.g. the time, first line and sender of an incoming text message, etc.
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June 5th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
Well, They use that much because it’s there, omnipresent right?
Well, (possibly) dumb conclusion apart, I would like to set the opposite view. If there was not home screen since the beginning. You unlock you go to the menu. That mystical menu button that now is fading away from S60 could have been the “apps button” and multi task would not be a hidden feature a lot (considerable) amount of S60 users didn’t know about.
Anyhow, there was a homescreen, and it’s going to be there. And this seems a logical step to it, but as a heavy S60 user I wonder if it’s not becoming a little bit too much while other aspects fall behind, begging for improvements on the basic experience across the s60 UI.
I would really love to see the same love in the access point problem
closing: Congrats to the team: it’s a real advantage to the users, good step for S60 and not having those “shallow” screen (multimedia key from N95, N93, and the newer carrousel one) is really a nice thing@
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Michael Reply:
June 15th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Hi,
I am a Nokia Freak, and really looking forward by having the cool home screen of the N97 in 5800 XM which I love!!! Please, break leaches for the 5800XM! It is a must! For such a great phone!!!
Michael
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June 16th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Dear Nokia
Well i bought 5800 XM aka “Tube” 4 months back and i am not so happy with my decision. Though you have released a couple of firmware updates in the past which improved the speed and fixed a lots of bugs but still the phone’s performance has not been upto the mark.
Firstly, the homescreen looks not just blank but waste of such a large space. There is no option to add few applications and widgets (its a 3.0 inch screen and its all blank man). Just look at the N97 homescreen and even the upcoming 5530 XM boasts of better homescreen than 5800 XM. I was expecting a major firmware update to a N97 look a like homescreen but till now there has been no such thing, which really concerns me about the innovation at Nokia Labs. I do understand there may be some software related issues but that that should not be much of a headache since both N97 and 5800 XM run on S60 V 5.0
Another point of concern is that of applications. You guys have not been releasing any Usable applications for S60 V5.0. I don’t understand releasing applications like Drums, guitar, piano etc really serve any purpose except for a one day show off. You have been talking a lot about applications such as Skype on N97, i would really like to have that on Nokia 5800 (where’s my piece of cake). And more such widgets from Nokia Labs (atleast give another update of Nokia web browser its still slower than the Opera mini). I really appreciated your efforts when you gave all tools to developers for developing 3rd party applications last week (WRT plugins on Adobe Dreamweaver, Visual Studio and Aptara 2.0) . All thumbs up for Nokia Photo Browser, waiting for a similar kind of application called “Media Browser” where we can drag through albums, songs and videos in a 3D UI.
Last but not the least “GAMING” : I have no problem with you people giving N97 as the flagship for N-gage on touch screen mobiles. But wait a minute, 5800 XM is the flagship model for touch enabled phones by Nokia and you are not releasing N-gage on “Tube” itself, atleast give me a date for the release.
Waiting for the updates and believing that Nokia really concerns about its customers.
Long Live Nokia!!!
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July 6th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
and i want the Kinetic Scrolling too!!!!
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July 16th, 2009 at 11:48 am
to the creative efforts of Team-Nokia, thank you. your intuitive design development is very much appreciated.
this is really good stuff. sleek. smart. very useful design.
finally, the large screen is now being put to use -to its real potential.
could you please bring this feature to the estimated more than 7 million 5800xm users? -the number includes mini-me.
please..please,nokia developers…be our angel and grant our humble request.
if you are thinking of something to show your appreciation for the overwhelming global sales of 5800xm -this lovely homescreen will do it.
this would probably be a ’sweet gift’ for the early adapters (beta testers?) of first nokia phone under smybian s60 5th edition.
nokia, we hope that you do listen to your dedicated users and react positively and creatively in a timely manner. thank you for not being passive.
(ps: if you do this homescreen feature in the next 5800 firmware upgrade and even add kinetic scrolling. wow.thats would more than ok, i’l surely not complain. il treat it as a big early christmas bonus -for year 2009,of course;-)
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