Peter Marklund's Home

I've had the privilege and misfortune of using a Nokia N70 3g camera phone over the last couple of days. My first impression of the phone has been mostly a series of frustrations but most importantly a lesson in the importance of usability and delivering on the basics. To quote 37Signals:

The basics are the secrets of business. Execute on the basics beautifully and you’ll have a lot of customers knocking at your door. Cool wears off, usefulness never does.

Well, if 37Signals had consulted for the Nokia N70 development team I'm sure its UI and featureset would have been radically different.

To use a phone I need to know how to turn it on and off, how to disable the keyboard to put the phone in my pocket, how to put the phone in silent mode, how to make normal old fashioned phone calls, how to store friends phone numbers, and how to send SMS (including how to turn the auto completion on and off and write special chars like punctuation). That's about it. That's the full list of essential features that I need to master in order to pick up a phone and get by with it in my everyday life.

There is too much noise in the N70 UI, the essential features are not prominent and accessible enough. All else being equal, the more features you add, the more noise, the less obvious the basics will be, and the lower the usability. The user manual mirrors the N70 UI in being unstructured and not highlighting the basics. For example, I would have expected the first chapter to tell me what's in the package, have a picture of the phone and explain essential buttons and functions, how to turn the phone on and off etc. The Nokia N70 manual doesn't care for this approach but instead dives straight into advanced features such as how to configure the camera.

Another reason for low usability is not following conventions. The N70 phone is in between a Windows desktop UI and the UI of a second generation phone (remember the phones that didn't have cameras and internet?). It has its own set of conventions and before you have loaded those into your brain you are likely to be left confused and frustrated. Clicking the "select" button placed to the left on the phone is the equivalent of the right mouse button in Windows. Ok, so left and right are confused, we can live with that I suppose. Well, hold on, that analogy doesn't even hold because some of the options you get when you press "select" are not related to that particular item but to the whole list of items...

Putting the phone in silent mode is something I need to do often and its about 11 clicks on the Nokia N70. At the same time the desktop (start screen) is mostly empty and as far as I can tell not configurable, and several buttons on the start page are left unused.

Let's leave this ramble on a positive note - taking pictures with the phone is easy! Just slide open the camera and press the button. I figured that out on the first try. Except, the annoying thing about the camera is that it slides open by mistake and is left in camera mode in my pocket. This might explain why the battery drains so quickly, or maybe that is because of the large screen and all the software. Oh well, I try to be positive, I really do...