Mobile design strongly influences our usage: Nokia

Somebody might be observing you closely the next time you pick your mobile to make a call but there is no need to start looking behind your shoulder everytime you need to make a call. The Nokia design team is shadowing people to observe the consumer usage pattern. In essence, `Observe and then design' sums up the design philosophy of Nokia, the global handset market leader.

“Observing people is the key to what we do. This helps us in knowing their exact needs and then creating experiences that are relevant to them and enhance their lives. This makes the product easy to use in a most natural way,” says Robert Williams, design manager, Nokia Design Studio.

Their research has come up with some interesting insights. For instance, most of the people spend 85% of their time on the homescreen of the mobile. “One of the most interesting finding was that people in different countries, different age groups and also with completely different life styles, had different expectations in terms of the content they wanted to consume. But they had the same priorities and values towards the core functionality like battery consumption, signal, time and date. Most of the people also wanted to have a very high degree of control over where they placed the widgets on homescreen for different reasons,” says Julianna Fereirra, design specialist-interactive design, Nokia.

Where India is concerned, an interesting finding was that women don't want to have too many functions on their homescreens but at the same time they also don't want it to be empty either since that would be indicative of the fact that they are not sophisticated users of the technology.

The company is increasingly working around the concept of digital design, which deals more with what happens in the phone and not so much the exterior design of the handset. Thus digital design can actually influence how people use the phone and how the icons manifest themselves in the user interface. Digital design helps in making personalisation even more specific. The biggest challenge the team faces is to offer flexibility and giving maximum control to the user.

More than 300 designers across the globe from 34 nationalities work in four design studios to come up designs which appeal to Nokia's global user base. The design studios are located at Espoo (Finland), London, Beijing and Calabasas (USA). It is important to have heterogenous mix of people which helps the team to address the needs of Nokia users across the globe. In the same context, the design team has industrial designers, user interface designers, graphic designers, psychologists, researchers, anthropologists and technology specialists.

Nokia's design team is developing and continuously evolving the `icons' which help the user navigate in the device. The company's global presence makes it difficult to come up with country specific designs. “The core model remains the same but we keep coming up with solutions which would adapt to the different cultures and background,” explains Williams. However Nokia does have some India specific designs of the mobile.

Talking about the trends in mobile designing, William says, “There is definitely a shift from passive use of communication medium. We are all very used to watching TV, listening to radio, which is essentially one way. Today we are producing and disseminating content from mobile. Design basically contributes in building tools and solutions which enable them to customize, to experience what they actually want to.”

Explaining the process of designing, Julianna says, “We first observe a trend and then we search for patterns and decide on the things we can improve upon. Then we create concepts from these insights and then we have the whole research process by which we identify if these ideas are really meeting these needs or not.”

Going forward, design is not going to be just about the device. “What is going to be more important is the content and what people want to do with their mobiles. Both the physical device and the what is inside needs to work together...ultimately it is going to be more about the user and not about anything else,” concludes Williams.

Gagandeep Kaur

Gagandeepk@cybermedia.co.in