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

(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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?