Bad Designs & Usability

Nokie E71 : good basic phone. But bad business phone

2008-12-21T17:42:00.004+05:30

Comments on Nokia as basic phone
1) This phone looks sexy and cool. Its compact, good battery life, sound and voice.
2)But keyboard interferes in the navigational keys and accept/rejectkeys.
Every time you want to accept or reject a phone, the qwertykeys(P&Q) below them will get pressed.

No dedicated button for camera. A useless hardware button for voicecommand/PPT is present. I guess 1% user may be using it. Instead itcould be camera button.

If you are considering to buy this phone against a windows or blackberry phone.. please consider these...

Nokiais still living Ice ages where they think they have invented a miraclebusiness application. But Nokia email features and design are patheticascompared with windows and blackberry. I don’t understand why theyhave not yet fired their Design & Product head. They have come upwith an email client which is like a black & White TV in 2008.There are hundreds of things that goes wrong this these allNokia/Symbian emails phones. They are like a bare minimum life supportfor emails/calenders. They are not suited for business email users. Ihave been using many windows mobile(Samsung i780, HTC, O2, Sony P1i)and other blackberry. Nokia fails ins following -

1. Lousiest processor(360MHz).Other business phones have 400 to 680HHz(samsung i780, iphone,HTCTTYII, Sony Experiea). Takes too much time to open emails,download, swhitch emails, etc.

2. Hundreds of unnecessary system messagesputting phone in modal mode(cant do anything else). Eg.. every time youswitch emails account(yahoo to Gmail) .. a message comes. (a)"Do youwant to Connect?". if said yes, it shows a big progress bar and onecant do anything. In windows Mobile, such idiotic operations are donein background. One can set few mails to download and still go and readother mail. In Nokia you just cant do any thing.., (b)"anothermessage"Retriving mails", Progress bars, etc... Looks like Noida has ahugh documentation team to show mesages.

3. Nokia still believesthat the whole world is hidden in their revolutionary "Options" menu,.They think the world is still living in 1995. Most of importantinformation and all actions are hidden in this great "Options" menu.They are 10 clicks away.. eg.. attachments are all hidden, as if they are not important. Creating new mails is a 10 click process. Options>message>New>email>exchange email> ....What a pathetic design.

4. There is no way to search the emailsin the email list. WindowsMobile does this beautifully. If you justtype few words of either name of person or subject line in email listview, all matching emails are filtered in runtime.. like the contactfilter. Nokia thinks its not important and according to them mostpeople have not more then 5mails in their mail box. I have 400 emailsin 5 emails accounts. Its a hell job on nokia. But very smooth onwindows and blackberry.

5) The moment you enter an email box, by default nokia takes you to the unread mails,no matter its sitting on 51th level. But i dont want this. I want toread the latest mail. So i have to keep scrolling.. or make sure that ihave read all my past 100 mails. Or nokia will punish me everytime...

6)There is no email suggesterlike in windowsmobile. I have to click "To", then go to contacts, thenselect a name(nokia dont show email id), then after selecting, nokiawill tell there are more emails to this name, so select one.. then icome back to email.. Such a big process. Why dont they just copy otherwindows emails function like in Outlook/WindowMobile. In windows phoneif you just start typing name in To field, all matchine emails justappears below.

7) No HTML view. Nokia have decided inthis world- 2009, no one needs to see html mails. They think we areancient caveman. Because of this lack of feature, most of the emailsshow to me as blank body. I dont know why.. Nokia just cant read thosehtmls formated mails. sometime it reads but most of time they areblank. But other mobile platforms - Windows Mobile 6, Symbian UIQ 9 ,etc do show html mails beautifully.

8)If you choose imap as folders format, then you cant have option to download emails by KB size. This is weird..

9 ) i dont know why Nokia cant provide seperate sent , outbox folders fordifferent email account. I have yahoo, Gmail and hotmail. .. all thesent mails of each mail account are put in only one sent mail. Itbecome difficult to sort them by email.. And anyway there is no search emails function anywhere.

10) There are many functions lacking in the email. If you sent a mail, you cant forward the same mail. You can edit the attachments and add new.

11) the folder view is a nonsense...If you select an email account, by default it shows all folder, thenagain i have to select inbox. This i have to do every time. They cantset inbox as default and have folder to switch by options menu.Everything in nokia is many clicks away..

10) Nokia has not at all used the qwerty keyboard as shortcuts. No button is mapped. Every thing is by options menu. What a shame..

11) Most of the places,wrong actions assigned to buttons.Eg. in an calender view, if i get an calender invite, and i click thecenter button, i should show the options to accept, reject, postpone..But instead it starts calling the person. They forget that i am incalender view and the center button should be mapped to theapplications. The green call key is already there for calling. Then whydo such mistakes.

12) The auto suggest for spelling is a bigfailure for qwerty keyboard users. Such users( also me) don’t look atthe screen while pressing keys. Now with spellchecker on, it starttying wrong words. Also, if i want to just check spellings at the endof email, there is no option.

13) The contacts application is really a shame. Now, since thisE71 is an emailing phone, they should show email on mouseover thecontact. But instead, i have to open the contact and then select theemail. There is no way to customize the view of contacts. eg..name+number, name + email, single line view, two lines., show pictures,Show latest added contacts, Show most frequently used contacxts. Showcontacts by date creations, picture view. These features really help toget right contacts if you have 1000+ contact. I do have.

Looking at all this, nokia should not call them self as emailing phone. They are a toy maker in emailing business...

All these above basic features are ther ein windows mobile phone.

More nokia failures later ...

Sameer.

File browse dialogue- MSFT

2007-01-11T15:32:00.000+05:30

This is a insert picture dialogue for Microsoft Word. I think i double clicked on the header to expand it maximise to search an image and then added it to world doc. But after sometime i again clicked the insert image icon and then... it put a full screen dialogue for selecting image. I was searching for a minimise button on top and re size handle on bottom. I couldn't see. And i didn't remember how i had made it maximise. Then i remembered that i need to double click on the title bar to reduce. But my god.. what a trap i was in..
If they are allowing the dialogue to be maximise, should we not have the minimise title bar button ?

Easy7 conference at Bangalore

2007-01-11T15:13:00.000+05:30

Attended the Easy7 conference at Bangalore on 5th Jan. This time I saw a small crowd compared to last time. May be they didn't had enough seats. Well, it looks Chi-si.org has now changed its model of conference. I would now rather call it a workshop then conference. They didn't invited any papers. Last year I presented there on "standards based UI Design".
This year it was only invited speakers. They were Jeremy Ashley (Oracle), Bill Scott (Yahoo), Surya Vanka (Microsoft), Sarah Bloomer.
I have been attending the Easy conference for past 3yrs and each year i could see new faces. India is really growing in HCI.
There was going to be an evening meet called by folks from design-for-use. I missed it as i had to catch up with a meeting.

Usability of Shampoo bottles.

2007-01-03T10:05:00.000+05:30

Very simple designs but highly usable. The first shampoo bottle shows a pump that can be screwed and fixed. This helps when you are traveling and carrying it. Also accidental you don't pump the shampoo out.

The second bottle shows a cap that is at the bottom of the bottle. Or you can say the bottle is supposed to be kept upside down. This helps the thick shampoo to slide down and be available immediately once you open the cap.

The third bottle is a mouth freshener with a integrated cup. Isn't that great..you can know how much you are using.

But the usability of such small shampoo sachet is still in question. You tend to use this while you are in bathroom and try to tear it off. But you have slippery hands and you cant. Can there be better design to break this sachet with wet hands.

Salary Survey for HCI professionals in India

2007-01-03T09:37:00.000+05:30

The salary survey for 2006 usability professionals in India is out on www.upahyderabad.org

Videocon TV remote usability

2006-12-24T12:05:00.000+05:30

I have this Videocon portable(14 inch) TV. If you look at the remote, the designers have placed the most unused buttons(Frequency, Chanel scan & color settings) very close to most frequently used buttons(volume). They thought the user is going to carry this portable TV every alternate day to USA and then to India. They the user needs to change the frequency from 50Hertz to 60Hz. Then they thought user needs to keep scanning channels every day. It was such a headache that i finally chopped off the rubber buttons. You can see that. Thanks Videocon for providing rubber buttons.

Philips DVD player. Placement of buttons ?

2006-12-24T12:01:00.000+05:30

Check out this Philips DVD player. Everytime i have to eject the CD, to put the next one, i often swithch off this player. You know why ?.. .the power off button is next to CD window and eject button is far at the end. Dont you think is should have been reversed ?

Windows mobile 5 features

2006-12-22T11:27:00.000+05:30

The new windows mobile 5 OS do not allow for adding separate video for any contacts. You can just add picture. But look at the size of picture it displays.. It like a small icone.
Also the dialing pad do not have some important buttons(call history, Speed dial) mapped to hard buttons. You have to use the touch screen only...
Another big issue is it does not closes applications (eg- file manager, camera, photos viewer, music player) once you open it. They all run in background and eat your Ram. There is no exit menu for any application.
The fonts are very small. You cant really increase size to make it readable.
And off course it hangs many times.
I like it but still needs improvement.

Usability of windows mobile ActiveSync 4.5

2006-12-21T22:26:00.000+05:30

Guys i never thought of writing blog until i stumbled across horrible usability of Microsoft windows mobile PC software. They call it ActiveSync 4.5 It is used to synch the pocket PC ( PDA mobile phone) with your outlook and also install software on your mobile through your PC. But my god.. such a pathetic design.. too much of text and all confusion..

This image shows a add and remove tool of this ActivSync.. Can anyone tell me what should i do to remove software or add software.. God knows,.. its packed with soooo much extra text , i am lost. I just want to remove one software. IT confuses me whether i should click OK or Remove. For this any user needs to carefully read each text twice.

UPA Hyderabad

2006-08-28T14:02:00.000+05:30

I am happy to inform you all that Hyderabad Chapter of UPA has been formed. We invite everyone working towards HCI to come and join us. www.upahyderabad.org