Momentum behind the evolution of the Symbian open eco-system continues to gather pace. Yesterday the Foundation placed its web run time tools into open source. Today Nokia, market leader in mobile devices, put forward proposals for a new framework for Symbian-powered UIs, to the Symbian open community. The proposals will undergo open evaluation and critique.
The UI Concept Proposal for Symbian^4 provides additional details on the Orbit and Direct UI major contribution proposals that are currently being voted by the Symbian Foundation councils.
The document highlights how the Symbian^4 UI will benefit from Nokia’s contribution and will introduce important usability-focused improvements, for example by providing interaction and layout patterns that apply to all applications, for a unified and more consistent user experience.
The proposal also contains a list of features and a number of screenshots that give us a glance of how the UI will benefit from new layouts, user-facing libraries for Contacts, Music, Photos and Applications and many other features that deliver a fresh user interaction: my attention was caught by the proposed removal of a number of prompts to the user, a redesigned control panel and the elimination of tunneling Options commands, which seems to be a great response to what the community has been asking for!
Nokia have clearly focused on providing a highly competitive UI framework proposal that will place the Symbian User Experience into the race with the Android, PalmOS and iPhone.
But, for me, the most positive of all that puts this proposal beyond competition is the open approach they are taking: by publicizing the concept proposal so early so that they get valuable community feedback to take into account for the final proposal, they are taking openness a step beyond just code-openness.
The following screenshots can give you a taste of what has been said so far, but for the full details please review the proposal and let us know what you think!
Make the battery and signal indicator to be horizontal and add digital clock below them in the box.
@Trust
Ditto!
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Yeah, that signal & battery is odd, out of place. How do people know when they have received a message or when WLAN/Bluetooth is on? That are has no room for any other icons.
let me move the clock where I want to, and use a digital clock instead.
@maurice – the full proposal clearly states that widgets are moveable, and it would be a huge shock of the digital/analogue clock choice that already exists didn’t remain.
About the notification, just reduce the title bar height a litte bit and put those notification icons near the edge like what have been on the S60v5
Thanks everyone for the comments so far. It’s good to see people excited about the proposal and we’ve had a lot of comments on the forum as well. I’m sure that the new UI will provide the enablers to implement some of the things suggested in the comments so far, like those related to icon size, position of items on the screen and so forth.
Let’s not forget that this is a UI concept proposal and I think we should focus on the features that really change the Symbian^4 UI in terms of the technology contributed, the usability improvements and the new interaction patterns. Differentation opportunities will always be available to platform adopters if they want to give the platform their look and feel, customise the UI and plug-in their own services on the Symbian platform.
Salrin – is a way of looking at this to say – imagine Microsoft has decided to OS windows and then close to the time that the open sourcing was due they entrusted the community with the co-definition of the user interface of the latest windows based interface environment. Not the actual Windows 7 screen but the capability to build many many windows 7 type UIs? I’m asking because I want to grasp both the technical detail but also the tremendous innovation we’re all taking part in here.
[...] amazing what Nokia is doing in open innovation. I’m really pleased to be part of this: http://bit.ly/4uJz6o Tags: fresh, [...]
This may be a dumb question, but can the s^1 (n97 OS) be upgraded to the s^3 / s^4 in the future?
Change the font to something more visually appealing!
[...] The proposal was turned in to the Symbian Foundation on Friday, and will now undergo open evaluation, according to a blog post. [...]
[...] The proposal was turned in to the Symbian Foundation on Friday, and will now undergo open evaluation, according to a blog post. [...]
@Haydn
Yes, and I think yours is a very effective way to explain it
We should look at the ‘enablers’ that the new UI will benefit from, because for things like fonts, theming, generic look and feel, widget size, position of items on the screen etc.. there will always be a factor of customisation that comes from the manufacturer that will be placing Symbian^4 handsets on the market.
UI differentiation is obviously possible and if we see ‘detail A’ in one of these screenshots today it doesn’t mean that all Symbian^4 devices will have that detail. But of course if we are talking about platform technology, Symbian^4 devices will all benefit from the great technology innovation (the ‘enablers’) that we’ve been looking at. And the enablers are the new user interaction patterns, the better integration of applications and the usability improvements highlighted in the UI concept proposal.
The innovation is there, clearly, and the differentiation opportunities will also be there – and it can’t be otherwise when you have a truly open source platform that can also benefit from our open governance model.
Seconding Trust, make the meters horizontal and fit more stuff there.
Same for the huge “Homescreen” banner. Make the font smaller and fit two lines there, one for the carrier banner and other for the date/profile.
And, remember, make sure to display both the date and the profile name at the same time! Since Symbian OS 6 people have complaining how the date doesn’t display if you have the profile set as Silent or anything else.
This may sound obvious, but remember lots of people commented how double tapping was a bad idea since the first mockups of S60v5 came out, and it still was in the final.
I have read the proposal and it looks very exciting, the screenshots look ugly to be honest, just put that homescreen aside with the other companies homescreens that were mentioned and you’ll see what I mean, it’s like when they announced s60v5 and everyone was excited but it was just the same s60v3 with touch.
Keep working!!!
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I think suggestions from Nokia should NOT be considered – just the concepts themselves of regarding the UI components.
I say this because Nokia is not evolving in the UI design space. Their sticking to paradigms that have failed them in total global sales and marketshare that continues to drop and a steady pace of 7% each year for the past 3-4yrs now.
UI design should be internal … or the basics of the paradigms for controls, displaying information/data/icons/etc. while the actual UI layout is left UP to the manufacturers, and edited further to support provider customization.
eg. standards such is the increasing bars for signal strength representation that EVERY cellphone user is accustomed to doesn’t change. Nor should an easily recognizable battery icon be completely changed. Location of such icons is completely up to the manufacturer to decide and will change as UI rotation is used for Touch or Touch-combo devices. Same thing can be said about buttons … modern technology on capacitive screens with extremely high resolutions shouldn’t mean buttons have to be LARGE, we should have decent sized buttons, using colour or opaqueness levels, border highlights etc, to make them stunningly visible without overkill and the buttons can remain small … giving more real-estate to a cleaner UI.
Prom1, aka Donny
SeriousMobile
former S60 3rd Edition fan, longtime phone user.
The title-bar is too thick! Why? Maybe to give space for the vertical signal and battery indicators? Why vertical? It steals even more precious space when you rotate the screen to landscape.
suggestion: Make the indicators horizontal so that the title-bar can be thinner therefore making better use of screen real state.
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That’s a terrible mockup. If these are highlights I won’t want to see the rest of the UI. The mockups are more than subtly inspired by the iPhone, with worse execution, plus it’s four years late!
This shows no amount of creativity, no innovation, no skill in execution. It’s embarrassing for Symbian and Nokia.
Well done. We’re definitely in the right direction!
But please, post more screens to see as they come. Is the Symbian UI Brainstorm blog dead? I thought it was a nice channel to discuss current and future user interface trends.
[...] 16.01.2010 22:18 Nokia esitteli Symbian yhteisölle oman ehdotuksensa miltä Symbian^4 UI:n pitäisi näyttää. Ja hyvältähän se näyttää. Toisin [...]
“Change the font to something more visually appealing!”
It’s much more importany that font is clear and easy to read. Best would be if user can set the font to whichever is best for him/her.
“The title-bar is too thick! Why? Maybe to give space for the vertical signal and battery indicators?”
In my opinion it is not too thick. It’s important that text and notification icons etc are not too small so that we who don’t have so good eyes can read those too.
“suggestion: Make the indicators horizontal so that the title-bar can be thinner therefore making better use of screen real state.”
I don’t aggree with this. Making that bar too thin makes it difficult to read icons and text. Sure it’s easy for those who have good eyes, but not all have those.
OK, so every widget is movable. But from this small discussion here we can see that they need to be rotatable and squshable(TM) as well.
Where is Nokia innovation ???
It’s very similar to IPhone, people always seek for new well desgined UI.
This UI is adding good value for Symbian but not the UI that beats IPhone !!!
I’m proposing that there should be better movement/transition between different applications, so that you don’t always have to open apps separately. By this I mean for example that the present feature of being able to call to numers when seen them almost in any application (browser or calender) should be developed to addresses so that you can open an address seen on any application on maps without the complicated copy/paste function and opening maps separately which doesn’t even work on my 5800 now.
This idea should considered further so that the cap between apps is deminished and tasks can be performed more easily and faster with less taps and always openin a new app.
@Prom1 and Mike – we are not suggesting these are Nokia’s actual screen designs – they are among many options that the concepts could deliver.
Hi Kensai – always good to see you back here. We are redesigning the blog area at the moment. UI brainstorm isn’t dead. It’s good to know you like to debate stuff there. Scott is on vacataion right now so I can’t ask him about his plans but February you should see quite a fe changes around here.
Hi Sameh
I’m sure Effie will be in with a response tomorrow but for my part I’d like to say that I think innovation is up to the community. This is a proposal from Nokia for an enabling framework, not a definitive set of screenshots. Will this framework enable innovative uses of the screen? If not what will?
One question, I own the nokia n97 mini, this new interface will be available for my phone by downloading software, or only available for phones new created from 2010 onwards. Thanks for your reply.
For me it’s promising (if unsurprising) in the touch-screen basics but frustrating in its incompleteness. There are allusions in the text to key functionality that’s crying out for explanation: how you get to your content “libraries” from the home screen, how notifications are handled, how tasks and task management generally are approached.
On the subject of notifications and task management in particular, Android and webOS have between them raised the bar versus iPhone, and I really hope Nokia have taken those advances on board for Symbian. The thing is, those aspects aren’t afterthought UIs or points of pure cosmetic differentiation any more; you have to build them into your core design otherwise you’ll be limited in what you can achieve later.
The very best examples are tightly-integrated facets of the overall interaction design of the device and enabled via high-level framework support. I’m talking about the ability to create and mange logical, user-visible task stacks independent of application boundaries (like having two work-in-progress email compositions on the go while still being able to read your inbox). App views that are dynamic enough to resize to enable rich, interactive display of notifications or other transient controls. Notification APIs for third-party apps that allow their notifications and status indicators to be just as rich and diverse as the built-in set. Greater flexibility in the way you utilise UI services exposed by other applications.
Anyway, fingers tightly crossed on the above. Technically, Symbian could support it all, no problem. I’m worried, though. I fear a “shallow” interaction design that doesn’t get any of this potential or just views it as out of scope, leaving us with something app-centric again, probably dressed up with a transition-effect-heavy adaptation of the S60 task manager with screenshot thumbnails.
Other misc concerns…
Still not really sold on the widescreen aspect ratio used in 5th edition devices, so disappointed to see it front-and-centre here again.
Slightly surprised to see the “answer” and “end” call hard keys mandatory in the design. With so many leading smartphones evolving away from that I expected there to be more flexibility. I guess it’s a differentiator of sorts!
@PP
While I would agree with you that freedom should be given in the implementation of the UI by other device manufacturers I think you’re making a mistake in believing that because ‘many leading smartphones (are) evolving away’ from having dedicated call and end keys that must mean that this is the right way to go. For all of Apples UI wizardry, their hard headed insistence on keeping moving parts out of their devices means that the iPhone has a preposterous two-step hardware+software unlock mechanism. Don’t try to convince me that because it’s Apple it must be right. Same goes for the hardware call keys.
One point you did make that I would like to highlight (because I whole-heartedly agree with it) is that applications should not be restricted to a single instance. Why can’t I have two browsers open at once for example? I hope to see this capability soon.
Brendan, I wasn’t really thinking about Apple specifically, just observing a bit of a trend. Fewer of today’s Android phones seem to retain the call control hard keys than previous generations for example. Palm’s “Plus” revisions of their hardware remove a (non call) hard key.
It’s about flexibility and choice for users and manufacturers, not what’s “right” as an abolute. It’s for that reason that I’d have perhaps hoped to see more supported hard key and aspect ratio options in its design goals.
As I said, I do agree with the principal of flexibility for users and manufacturers, but my own view is that removing the call hardkeys is a highly misguided trend. One of the few use cases on a device where an event is ‘pushed’ and must be responded to in a very limited time frame is for an incoming call. Here it is very useful to have an easily located, tactile hardware key for answering (or even dismissing) the call. I personally would never want to own a phone where I need to be looking at the screen in order to answer a call. Obviously many disagree with me because the iPhone does quite well – but I guarantee that’s for entirely different reasons then its abilities as a phone (sorry to hang up on Apple again, but despite the hype the same argument can’t be made for Android, i.e. that it is hugely popular).
[...] Symbian game-changers via blog.symbian.org [...]
[...] sexta-feira, a Nokia anunciou, em seu blog oficial, que vai modificar a interface do Symbian^4 com o objetivo de torná-lo mais competitivo para [...]
There is one question no one has given the answer to… Will current S60v5 devices be able to update to Symbian^4 when available?
It would be nice to have the answer to that…
Now on the UI…
Having in mind the size of the screen and of the average finger size I would say the title bar is fine as it is. Let’s not forget that the title bar of the iPhone may be slimmer but it is not clickable… try to click on an icon 2 by 2 mm and see what happens.
The 16:9 screen ratio has not worked much. I mean, it is OK, especially when watching 16:9 ratio movies but how much time would you do that per day? I think a screen ratio of 19:10 (as PC LCDs) would work better even if it makes the phone a bit wider.
One thing about the design, all Nokia phones I have had so far starting from 3650 have something in common – the design looks old. It’s like when you see that brand new Audi A8 and compare it to a 1978 Lamborghini Countach LP400S… the Lamborghini is far more powerful but the Audi looks better. (personal opinion)
Symbian has the power but Android and iPhone OS have the visuals.
Some ideas:
- Make it rounder, enough with the rectangles already;
- Add better screen and menu animations (this has been mentioned in the concept and it’s in the right direction);
- Add more gesture controls (turn to mute is far from all you can do, examples: shake to voice command or dial, lean to scroll, etc.)
- Hide the notifications faster and give the option to disable them (when I dial now, a notification that call diverting is active shows every time and stays for 5 seconds during which I cannot do anything and the worst of all is that I know that my calls are being diverted and don’t need to see the notification every time)
- Add more ‘press and hold’ menus to items, like right-clicking on something instead of clicking on Options
- Add multi-touch – even if it not a must it still helps for zooming in and out
- Allow for downloadable language packs – I’m in Bulgaria but want to have my phone in Spanish, now I have to hack my phone because it only has Eastern European languages + English. I should also be able to remove some of the languages since they use memory but I don’t need them.
This would be all for now… I hope you find something useful in my post that you haven’t already considered…
Best to all!
Guys, why bother? This Symbian thing of yours is as good as dead.
The reason nobody has said whether current devices will get Symbian^4 is because it’s hard to tell. But since NGA,which will be the graphics architecture for future devices, requires hardware acceleration – I would say no. And that among other reasons.
Gyll – why don’t you join in the debate rather than dismissing it? We’d like to ehar your views not this cliche that’s flagging as it does the rounds.
@Kensai: UI Brainstorm is not dead; we have been having lots of ideas coming, but due to work overload and higher priority issues we haven’t had time to update it recently. But it’s in our todo list in the week, go and check for some fresh ideas in a couple of days
@jaysmith: It is not really up to SF to say if the S^1 device will be upgradable to S^3 or S^4. Technically I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible, but whether OEMs and operators will choose to offer it is another story.
So glad to see a lot of valuable feedback in these comments! The purpose of this post was to stir discussions up and encourage people to say what they think, but it would be so much preferable if you gave your feedback through the forum (last link in the article).
@Effie
I think the use of NGA without graphics hardware is not viable (there are software based versions, but they are slow and I don’t think they would be used on a consumer device). Since current models (N97, X6, 5800 etc) don’t have graphics hardware I think it’s technically *not* possible if NGA is used under the hood.
I had used many Symbian phones (Nokia and Sony) until I switched to Iphone camp last year. I am not sure which technologies are better. But as an end user, the most important aspect is the ease of use that matters most. This is where Iphone beats most of their competitors. Last month, I tried Sony Erricson – SATIO – which is based on Symbian because the physical design was 100X nicer than Iphone. I was hoping to see something equal or better than iphone. Unfortunately, I CAN NOT believe something so simple and critical like ‘alarm’/'clock’ for Symbian was so still so primitive ! Couldn’t Symbian just learn from Iphone for simple things like that !
My point is if Symbian is going to come up with something new, just focus those simple and useful things as the main priorities. Make them much more friendly. Hide those technical things from users. There are tons of icons in Symbian that most customers do NOT even need and do NOT even understand them. Keep it simple and elegant.
I can notice the Back button has crept up in the top right corner.
Will we have some better text predicting than whats offered by T9/XT9? And better looking virtual keypad with more features.
1) Is this back indicative of moving to the previous application or previous view in the same application? iPhone does this by “worded” arrows to move to the previous view in an application.
Sony ericsson has the back button as a hard key (maybe soft as well, not sure).
2) When we say applications dont run in the background, then how do we write the applications that are network dependant?
3) Will this do away with the active applications (home key long press)?
4) Any study done on bringing up an application from sleep, when the user switches to another application?
5) When user moves from one app to another are we saving the state as persistent objects? If so, whats the delay in first saving state and then moving to the next app or bringing up the saved state of the app?
6) If back button moves to previous view, is there a need for a forward button (or the assumption is the user will repeat the same steps as he did earlier to go to the forward view?)
7) Can the widgets be repositioned or temporarily pushed out of the screen and brought back by some gesture? Can the widgets be resized?
9) In the landscape mode, can the indicator pane move to the left or right, instead of top? Or maybe when office apps or emails are in use, the user has the provision to move them to the left or right?
@Brendan Thank you for the valid point; I actually checked with Arunabh Ankur and Martin Webb after your comment, to be able to provide a valid answer. Quoting them:
“I agree to the fact that NGA without a dedicated Graphics H/W is not viable. From an architecture point of view , NGA relies very closely on the underlying H/w adaptation and there won’t be any commercial imperative for an OEM to do it for an old H/W. With the software solutions , the performance may be so sluggish that it may not add up to a good consumer experience.
Then again, going to the actual question – “Can the s^1 (n97 OS) be upgraded to the s^3 / s^4 in the future?“
That doesn’t seem the way , specially because a lot has changed between S^3 and S^4 which comes at a cost of H/W update. Even though in theory if it happens , it is the OEM who may have to back-port and release a new rom for an old device.
NGA also changes how the multimedia world works, in that video no longer renders directly to the screen, but to an off-screen surface that is managed by the composition engine. Thus the dynamics of the lower-levels in that world will also change.”
I don’t understand why you guys keep posting ideas about Nokia UI here (and hoard them on the UI brainstorm blog).
Nokia doesn’t care, and will not even read your comments/ideas. Who will? What is the point of this?
Nokia will design its UI regardless what you say, and I can’t see the Symbian Foundation having any say of their (or any other OEMs) UI design.
We are totally wasting our time here.
@mrmr
That’s a very negative attitude to have – obviously you don’t believe in the open source philosophy.
@Brendan
Just trying to point out the obvious here (bluntly, I agree).
The day Nokia takes in a major contribution from symbian.org back into it’s codeline and puts it into a phone I will buy you an ice cream of your choice.
@mrmr
No thanks, don’t want to get fat (you’ll be buying me a lot of ice-cream). Tell me, why is it ‘obvious’?
@Effie
Thanks for getting confirmation from the experts. I did just remember though that the SE Satio and the Samsung i8910HD both have hardware acceleration, so maybe Samsung and SE would be candidates for backporting? In fact, the i8910HD has poor or nonexistant firmware encryption and there’s an active hacking community for it – so maybe we might see S^4 on that!?
[...] The proposal was turned in to the Symbian Foundation on Friday, and will now undergo open evaluation, according to a blog post. [...]
Ultimately, the design of the UI should be driven by a strategic business decision – primarily, to take the initiative from the iPhone. The perception has to be the new UI signifies something revolutionary (a paradigm shift – horrible term I know). More of the same – with a few tweaks, or making the UI more iPhone-like, will not be sufficient. The perception will be that the UI is either nothing new or copying the iPhone. In which case, Symbian-based smartphones will continue to be regarded as inferior to the iPhone.
Revolutionary or game-changing interfaces in the mobile space should be either seek to take gesture based control further or experiment with 3D interfaces – with the aim of simplifying the user-experience. Modern mobile CPUs with PowerVR SGX graphics cores should be able to support these developments.
Designers need to be encouraged to think beyond the current scope of UI design, with the aim of simplifying the user-experience.
The font thing should be and option in the settings.
In gallery in the side bar there should be a shortcut to the camera and in the camera side bar there should be a shortcut to gallery
combine the best of android and iphone os and maemo6 with the best of symbian
and my last advice is nokia needs to redesign their icons and theme. make it look cute and professional
[...] December announcement crystallised in a follow-up announcement that Nokia had delivered its proposal for a revised Symbian UI to the Symbian Foundation for consideration. The proposal is available [...]
[...] A Nokia divulgou nesta sexta-feira uma nova proposta para interface de usuário do sistema operacional Symbian^4, com o objetivo de competir com a do iPhone e a do Android, do Google. A proposta foi apresentada à Fundação Symbian e será submetida à avaliação, de acordo com nota publicada no blog oficial da empresa. [...]
for me it’s okay since it is so neat to look at, unlike any phones that has a lot of stuff at the top that makes me dizzy. My only comment is make the fonts customizable so that we can make it smaller or bigger or choose fonts due to our tastes.
that’s really a fantastic post ! added to my favourite blogs list.. I have been reading your blog last couple of weeks and enjoy every bit. Thanks.