Simon’s Blog

There’s a huge amount of innovation going on in mobile phone handsets, with phones taking steps forward in power every few months. The electronics are getting more and more powerful: faster processors; better quality screens with more colours; longer battery life; higher quality, higher resolution cameras; support for more Java APIs.

But many phone manufacturers are missing an understanding of some fundamentals. They’re what I call “hygiene factors” – features that, when you them get right, don’t increase the pleasure of using the phone particularly. But – if you get them wrong, people find it really irritating. Getting the hygiene factors wrong will reduce the market for a phone. Some manufacturers are just not thinking hard enough about user interfaces. That’s both the graphical user interfaces, and the physical interfaces (keypads, joysticks etc.). A couple of the biggest hygiene factors for mobile handsets are getting the design right for allowing people to make phone calls, and for sending SMS texts.

This afternoon, I compared, side by side, the user interfaces for composing SMS text messages on two phones: an old phone, the Nokia 3310; and a new phone, the Sony Ericsson K750i. The K750i is much - years - newer. If innovation was working properly, the newer phone should have beaten the older one hands down. But the truth is – the K750i wasn’t even close to being as good as the 3310 for composing texts.

Of course, those us of who are focussed on building great software, know all about how bad the user interfaces for most pieces of software are. In one sense this good news – it helps us win out over our competition. But in another sense, it’s bad news. As an industry, we need the handsets to be the best they can, given the state of technology at any given time.

What fundamental mistakes did the K750i designers make, when it comes to hygiene factors for composing SMS text messages? Well, a key feature of a design should be to minimise user interface errors. i.e. help people to get the phone to do what they want. The K750i gets this wrong in a couple of important ways: firstly, there is no space between the keys on the keypad, making it all too easy to hit the wrong key (compare the design of the Nokia 310, or more recently a Blackberry keypad); and secondly, the predictive text graphical user interface requires the use of the joystick to pick options in a list – requiring the user to take their fingers of the keypad (increasing the chance of making a mistake).

These hygiene factors are not hard to get right. But by the same token, they’re clearly easy to get wrong. And for the ones I’ve discussed above, they’re the difference between allowing people to compose texts quickly and enjoyably, or not. To expert “texters” - and that’s what many people in the target demographic for K750i are – I would say this is a major problem. If the mobile phone industry wants to make headway, creating feature-rich, connected devices e.g. displacing the iPod from its music player leadership position, then it’ll have to raise its game when it comes to user interfaces. The technology is there. The thing that’s stopping the phone taking over is user interface design.