Hi,
I am Effie Vraka, Technology Specialist in Symbian foundation, looking after the Multimedia Applications area of the platform.
Last July Scott Weiss started the Symbian UI Brainstorm blog, which has become so popular that the Brainstorm team has grown to include James Aley and me. We work together to publish the wonderfully frequent stream of brainstorms that come in. In this post I will share a taste of the UI Brainstorm to date, some background, stats, and even some success stories.
The UI Brainstorm’s purpose is pretty simple: it gives end users the chance to show what they would like to see different in the UI on their Symbian phones. The rules are also simple: capture a phone screenshot and explain your idea by editing the image. For example, draw arrows to show gesture, paste icons to create the proposed design change, and most importantly, use as little text as possible to describe your idea. Your sketch doesn’t have to look perfect; it just needs to help the idea come across. In the spirit of no-judgement brainstorming, the site does not allow further textual description, comments or voting. Once you have your sketch ready, attach it in an email to uibrainstorm@symbian.org. We will then upload it anonymously, as long as it complies with the above rules. Why anonymously? Well, we want all the ideas to get equal chances once they get published – it doesn’t matter if you’re technical or non-technical, a company member or an individual, a developer or an end-user: everyone is welcome and encouraged to contribute their ideas to make Symbian phones more user-friendly and enjoyable.
We have been delighted to see the response to this invitation! Here are some numbers: at time of writing, there are 66 brainstorms published and around 7,000 visitors per month, with over 27,000 views since the site was created. Most popular categories appear to be “Touch” and “Usability”, while the most popular tags are “home screen”, “web browser” and “music player”. The latter is of particular interest to me, as there are some brilliant ideas in there for the domain I am looking after.
The best news I have to share today is that some of the Brainstorms are turning into contributions to the Symbian platform. Following are three examples.
“Solution to double-tapping”
… or, as Scott would poetically put it: “to tap or to tap-tap?”. This is a real success story, as this simple brainstorm
was converted to a contribution proposal by Ixonos.
“Characters in the Dialer”
This is another example where a brainstorm idea has been taken on board and will be part of the next platform release. Here is the entry in the Symbian Bug Tracker that shows it has already been implemented.
“Mini QWERTY”
An example of a brainstorm on the implementation of which we are working currently – open discussions on this are taking place on the Symbian ideas website. Please add your input.
If at this point you are already trying to think of a brainstorm of your own, this means that my mission is accomplished – I managed to inspire you ☺ It’s all those small “obvious” things, the ones that are under our nose but for some reason were never thought of, that make the difference between a good and a great user experience. And also all those innovative cool things that your phone can do and you can’t wait to show your friends! “Cooool – what genius ever thought of that?!!”
It is nice to see that my brainstorm idea created this proposal to remove double tapping. I have to say that it feels good to see my sketch about eliminating double tapping posted here. It is important to see that even something small like this suggestion I emailed to Scott can actually make a difference and end up improving usability. This is the way to go. Symbian Foundation, keep up the awesome work!
Indeed. Everybody seems to be challenged by usability requirements that they forget to ask their users “how would you like to interact with your device?”. I’ve also seen ideas for making UIs less right-handed oriented which I found very interesting too. I trust most of this stuff will be taken under serious consideration so ..keep posting!
Thanx for the valuable information. This was just the thing I was looking for, It is nice to see that my brainstorm idea created this proposal to remove double tapping. keep posting. Will be visiting back soon.
I would like to know what are the follow up actions being taken on the wornderful ideas proposed.
I would love to see the selected ideas are converted to formal requirements and vested on responsible teams.
@Tojo:
Once we find a really good idea, the first thing we do is match-making with potential contributors; there are quite a lot of companies that have expressed open interest to contribute to the foundation, so we need to find the ones amongst them that have relevant expertise to implement the idea. At the same time we bring the respective package owner into this process and discussions, as he/she is the one that has the overall responsibility for the software package. Finally, we also start open discussions with the community (through forum and ideas sites) to identify technical and other issues, provide valuable feedback and help shape the final idea. According to the size and importance of the idea (it could range from a small bug-fix to the introduction of whole new functionality), this will lead to to a major or a smaller contribution proposal. A major contribution proposal is prepared by the contributor company and submitted to the relevant SF council for approval, while a smaller one could just be approved by the package owner.
The above is just guidelines; a lot depends on the nature of the idea and its potential materialization, so there is flexibility and a range of different actions to take to suit each case. I hope this covers your question.
You guys must have your brains up your arse to need a brainstorm idea for putting alphabets on a dialer. Which world do you live in? Symbian, you are as good as dead! Count your days!
[...] idea” by Paul on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 | View commentsComments On Symbians blog they recently posted about their recent brainstorm ideas. One of the features was an alphanumeric [...]
why does the author post a pic of herself???
how does her picture add to the article??
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@rkb – The world we live in is called, ‘Not the United States’, population 6.5 billion or so. You see the single use-case for letters on the dialler in a phone with a QWERTY keypad (virtual or not) is so that people can figure out how to dial numbers that are listed as words. The rest of the world doesn’t do this, therefore why would I want letters on the dialler?
Also, note that the same ‘problem’ is there for any device with a QWERTY keypad, such as the E71 or even North American originated devices such as Blackberries.
Regardless of this point, firing abuse in Symbian’s direction doesn’t really achieve anything because this ‘mistake’ (as you seem to see it) was made by Nokia. They designed the UI. And they’ve fixed this in firmware v20 for the N97/mini.
I have to disagree with both ‘rkb’ and ‘me’.
@rkb:
I respect your comments but coming up with such kind of feedback is really a waste of time for everybody including yourself.
For now Symbian is alive, safe and sound, and it’s becoming a truly open mobile platform – and don’t assume that this is simple, for a starter. Second, Symbian powers most of the smart phones on this planet and I really don’t think it may die any time soon and there are loads of technical reasons for that.
Third, being open to a community of developers and end users does not mean they depend on a brainstorm idea, it means respecting the people you make the software for and open up to a constant dialog with them.
@me
I understand your point but as you may have noticed most of the Symbian Foundation employees put their picture typically on their first blog post. I have to say I like it, at least I know who’s talking to me and I respect the fact that these guys put their face on the spot freely and take responsibility for what they say when they could as well hide some nasty comments behind a short and cryptic nickname.
Thanks for all the comments. The point I wanted to make when writing this post was that the foundation not only appreciates and listens to the community, but actually takes action to drive materialization of the good ideas. We are an open source software foundation and all of our usability assessment, design, development, and most of our documentation come from the Symbian community. We don’t have developers on staff, nor designers, nor usability researchers. So our focus is to rally the community’s support and then do matchmaking with contributors to get the fixes and innovations into the platform.
In the comments there has been a lot of focus on the “characters in the dialer” idea, some think it is too obvious, some that is completely unnecessary, some just welcome it. The diversity of the reactions does not surprise me; it only reflects the diversity in the cultures of end users that have chosen Symbian phones – something what is considered a “necessity” in the US might have absolutely no reason for existence in another part of the world. The inevitable question is, in such a case, do we put it in the platform or not? My personal opinion is that, if it is a feature important enough for an important section of the Symbian market, yes we do. And, at the same time, we make it easy for stakeholders (OEMs, operators) to enable/disable it according to their needs and targeted market.
Finally, why I put my pic in the blog? I think mambo covered this perfectly – it is what we are encouraged to in our first Symbian blog post in the context of openness and interaction with the community.
Can I clarify that I didn’t think that letters on the dialler was ‘uneccesary’, just that we know who designed the dialler (some Finnish people) and that it’s not as obvious (for Europeans) to put the letters there as some people would make it out to be.
The best thing about Symbian is that they will not ignore or reject your idea for being ‘too obvious’ or ‘uneccesary’.Truly open software.