I’m Scott Weiss, User Interface Technology Manager for Symbian Foundation. I look after the User Experience of the Symbian operating system and family of Symbian web sites. I care about developers and consumers. A logical question for readers is, “how can one ensure a good user experience for open source software?” The first and most obvious answer to this question is a redirect to Firefox, which has 260 million users and 22.05% market share as of April 2009, according to Alex Faaborg, Principal Designer at Firefox. Firefox has changed the shape of the browser, putting Microsoft, Apple, and Google into a fantastic game of catch-up that has resulted in further user interface innovations that benefit the world’s browser users.
Firefox
Why is Firefox so successful? There are four key motivators for contribution:
- Mission: people care about the platform and want to promote choice and innovation on the Internet.
- Identity: people want to be part of a successful movement, to “compete” with Microsoft, and have the Firefox brand to enhance their personal image.
- Impact: improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people, all over the planet.
- Education: there is a lot to learn from being involved, and there are great apprenticeship opportunities.
User experience contributors to Firefox ideate, produce mockups, use flows, and prototypes, and enhance the visual design of icons and “browser chrome.” They log design bugs, contribute expert reviews, and ideate (see Flickr tag “Mozconcept”).
Mozilla and Firefox are my open source user experience heroes. What I hope to do at Symbian Foundation is to build a community of committed user experience contributors: usability practitioners, information architects, and graphic designers. With that community, we can propose both subtle and dramatic improvements to the operating system and its applications’ user experiences.
Upcoming UI Proposals to Symbian Foundation
We have a generous set of proposals in front of us from Nokia called Orbit and Direct UI. These proposals together represent a step change in the user interface of Symbian, with a consolidation of the application suite and the re-thinking of how touch is to be deployed on a mobile phone. Nokia’s Orbit and Direct UI proposals focus specifically on touch and touch-hybrid devices (like the N97, which has a slide-out QWERTY keypad). Non-touch devices are not included in this contribution, which creates a remarkably good opportunity for the community. My goal is to engage the community to create groundbreaking non-touch user interfaces for these new applications, in addition to the touch UIs being contributed by Nokia.
User Interface Abstraction: Opportunity
Symbian Foundation will have a reference UI design available for handset manufacturers. An initiative I have embarked upon is to abstract the user interface from applications so that other user interfaces can be created, much like the chrome on Firefox or a skin on a music player. However, my hope is that we can go much further, with different interaction paradigms, enabling designers to leverage the awesome capabilities of a Symbian phone with their own imaginative user interfaces that can be designed in a UI authoring tool and compiled down for contribution to the Symbian Foundation.
Get Involved
The openness of the Symbian platform affords us with a new level of design opportunity available on no other mobile OS: please take advantage of it. You can start by contributing to the User Interface Council’s online forums.
Mairin’s excellent blog entry informed this posting.
> What I hope to do at Symbian Foundation is to build a community of
> committed user experience contributors: usability practitioners,
> information architects, and graphic designers.
There are already an army of such people in the member companies of the Foundation. For example Nokia has made “User Experience” a primary focus of all its development work related to S60.
Do you see work being done in this area as duplicating or complimenting the work being done by the member companies? If the latter what do you see as being the differentiating factors?
David,
Great comment! The contributor community we seek at Symbian Foundation is for enhancements and extensions to the Symbian operating system to be part of the source code. Nokia’s focus is on attracting and caring for developers of applications that run on S60. So we are seeking different things.
However, Symbian Foundation is eager to encourage and nurture application developers for all Symbian handsets, of which S60 handsets comprise a significant percentage. There are also handsets running UIQ, and MOAP(S) as well.
> Nokia’s focus is on attracting and caring for developers of applications
> that run on S60. So we are seeking different things.
I really don’t believe that is true. The huge investment Nokia is putting into this area is not just on, for example, public APIs but is also on the very core of the development of S60 (moving to Touch in the N97 for example).
They have very significant ongoing market research in this area (which I wish I could show you).
I believe it might be of a great advantage to the Foundation to build agreements with the member companies to look at data they have already collected (or better yet to ask them to partially open up such data to everyone) rather than spend time and money duplicating the effort.
Don’t forget Tabs. A key reason that Mozilla succeeded to gain market share was that it was that much better than lagging IE 6.
Firefox has little innovation, and a lot of copying other successful ideas.
The key feature of mozilla is that the firefox UI that you see out of the box is almost an example of how to implement a browser using the mozilla web technologies. It can be customised through themes, plugins, XUL scripts or the web control can be embedded within other applications.
The flock browser (http://www.flock.com/tour/) demonstrates another application of the technology.
Open source UI design has a pretty ropey history and its not surprising that it has done best when copying other design ideas. Think KDE, open office…
This brings us to a very important idea. If you don’t want to enforce a design policy, then you should allow a high degree of “mashup” and customisation so that UI elements can be combined and reordered by designers.
However, without a solid design – how can you ensure that the UI framework can cope with a more challenging design. Policy always creeps in during development (e.g the dogma that every view is an ‘application’).
Having too many voices is often disastrous for UI. Given that S60 design evolution seems to be just 10 years of adding new tabbed list box screens, and of late adding cheap transitions between those list boxes, how can we move forward?
Stringer,
You too bring up good points. With contributions of user interface, I am not talking about ‘themes’, which are add-on media. I’m talking about alternate sets of controls and input mechanisms, an overarching design strategy for the full suite of applications. Plug-ins in Mozilla would be similar to Symbian applications, which we certainly welcome, but not as part of the source tree–those would be available through application stores, and potentially facilitated through Symbian’s consumer site(s).
Who would create and contribute new application user interfaces? Primarily, anyone creating a new handset. That is, however, only the most obvious choice. A design agency that works on a concept and wants to share it with the world may wish to make a contribution. Or an operator may want to widen the distribution of a custom UI they have created, or at least share the fundamentals, without the visual design “skin.”
The user interfaces will be separate from the visual designs, which could be delivered via themes. Symbian has this mechanism today, and it works well.
Lastly, Symbian Foundation is finalising the first draft of an updated, streamlined, transparent contribution process. That process includes two key review points for inventions, that involve the community and the Councils. Inventions are not small tweaks, but large-scale modifications to multiple packages. Watch blog.symbian.org for information about the contribution process in the next week.
Scott,
(Congrats on the new job and the wonderful opportunities that come with the responsibilities!)
In the past I have been involved with setting standards for mobile applications (this was for a large provider in the WAP-age) and found that the best way to document them was to use layers of abstracted user interface patterns, ranging form central user experience patterns, down to interaction patterns and styles. Depending on how much Symbian wants to control the interfaces you may want to stop earlier (or only use the latter ones for the reference interface) but I do suggest you look into using patterns to document the standard user experience(s), especially since a community can contribute to the set.
Peter,
Thanks for your input! We’ll be talking about a Pattern Library at tomorrow’s UI Council meeting (http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Foundation_Councils/UI_Council_minutes), so yes, we’re absolutely interested in patterns!
We’re also exploring how things like patterns can be contributed to Symbian Foundation. Right now all contributions are code-based, which is one of the reasons I’m interested in UI abstraction as XML… But someone is bound to want to contribute a usability study, or a wireframe design concept, or a Flash demo… So how can we accept those inputs? That’s what I’m thinking about now. Your suggestions are very welcome!
As a teaser, have a look at our wiki page on contributions–it’s a work in progress: http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Contribution_Process#Contributing_Source-code
[...] Scott is championing the idea of an additional new non-touch UI and a XML-based alternative to Nokia’s Orbit and [...]