Usability

Companies are only just understanding what a smartphone means in today’s world. I’m reminded of this as I watch Nokia Search take thirty-eight seconds to bring me to a Yahoo! search field.

Thirty-eight seconds is more than long enough to forget what you were searching for in the first place. About 63% of that wait is looking at a screen that says “finding search providers,” a search whose choice is never stored by the app, and is performed every time “search the internet” is selected.

But this is where the problem becomes apparent: Nokia Search isn’t really a web search application, it’s a mobile device search. The app launches quickly and happily, and starts returning video, emails, bookmarks and contacts (and more, even) results immediately as you start typing in your terms.

It says a lot that Nokia feels searching your emails/contacts/documents on your own phone is more important than searching the web. Like many smartphone makers, there’s been a strong emphasis on real computing on the mobile up until now. It’s a big marketing point for Nokia (e.g., the “it’s what computers have become” campaign they ran for the original N95), and it’s been a cultural force in the company that’s been evident in much of their concept and beta work. Windows Mobile is entrenched in mobile computing thanks to business & corporate IT interests, and Palm has always walked the line between users and productivity, balancing their original PDA goals with the needs of the mobile workforce.

Me, I just wanted a web search field.

That’s what was missing until now: finding the things that ordinary users would want to do on a “smart” phone, and focusing only on that. This is usually a matter of returns: it’s hard to retrofit a business platform like WinMo or the Blackberry into a “lifestyle” product. Few companies have the resources and freedom to start from scratch. And no one was comfortable with releasing a phone that did less. Why strip out features, or for that matter, sell to those people who “clearly” didn’t want those features?

The iPhone has been instrumental in putting the writing on the wall: it’s not about “doing things on your phone” anymore… it’s about “doing things with your phone.” And it’s a difference that is reflected in the physical shape of the device and how the software goes straight to making something happen for a user. Who tried to reach me? What is near me? What do I need to do next? Just another task this mutable slab helps you do, just more information it can pull for you. Editing a .doc file? That’s the past. Or at least, it’s not the focus anymore.

It’s a bit frustrating to see the Sidekick get such limited acknowledgment in this evolution of the smartphone. T-Mobile turned Danger’s device into a teenager’s phone in the States, from the webisodes that sold them, all the way down to the illustration of a purple-haired woman that graced the Phone application icon… alienating most adult users and preventing them from discovering its breakthrough features, like push email and OTA synchronization to a web portal where you could access & edit your info on the desktop. Even an (even more) affordable unlimited data plan. All “breakthrough” features or services of today.

Yet, T-Mobile’s research was probably right, that only the youth market was hungry to use those sorts of features at the time the phone was introduced. Could the Sidekick have been a breakthrough success like the iPhone? It was a solid enough product to, sure. But the iPhone did what was hard for the newcomers to do — giving the older market motivation to care about smartphones, by riding in on the perfect storm of iPod frenzy. As Jobs put it, it was an iPod, a Phone, and an internet device. The internet device part, in many ways, was the trojan horse of the set.

As much as it seems like Apple has taken over the market, it says much more about how much potential in this market has been opened up now that consumers care about these kinds of functions on their phone — or more accurately, these functions away from their computer. What is wonderful about the iPhone’s success is that we’re all starting to benefit from it. Not only by proving the viability of these devices, but by setting these baseline experiences.

We don’t always need to edit ID3 tags on our devices, we don’t need to actually do video editing on the device, and we certainly don’t need to run a web server on it — and not ironically, these are all features found in Nokia’s Nseries phones. The core uses for a general consumer are clear now, and simplifying software doesn’t need the hard sell anymore since it’s now evident in the world. Providing distinct solutions can take the place of having to make all solutions possible.

And you can bet that Google and Nokia are more than happy to hear that, too.

When we talk about “usable” or “intuitive” interfaces, Apple devotees and the web app crowd (myself included) tend to bias toward the first-time user….
— 37signals on the TripLog/1040 iPhone app

So true. Web sites are heavily-skewed towards winning people over on first-impression, which puts a lot of importance on perceived simplicity and attractive graphic/UI design. But it also undervalues real usability vis-a-vis accessibility and task-completion, which the app’s author (a veteran Palm developer) spent a lot of time trying to explain in the comments regarding the look-and-feel of his first iPhone application. In the end, all of his principles were valid, they just weren’t styled well, or assembled Apple-y enough for the masses.

It will definitely be interesting to see how developers moving to the iPhone from other mobile platforms weather the transition going forward.

[Edited 11-07-2007] Not sure if this reviewer is being meta, but one of the app’s first reviews on the App Store itself is “This lacks all of the UI elegance that the iPhone has come to be known for. This belongs on a Palm Pilot.”

From the Last.fm forums:

I took a look in the iTunes log and it says exactly why it doesn’t scrobble: I had MobileScrobbler installed. That’s true, when my iPod was jailbroken. However, I restored my iPod so that it’s not jailbroken anymore, but MobileScrobbler doesn’t do his job anymore and now Last.FM won’t either.

I also had a jailbroken iPod which I restored two weeks ago so I could be ready for the new v2.0 software. But since I’m running stock v1.1.4 now, this shouldn’t be happening. But there it is: “Mobile Scrobbler detected on iPod Touch - client scrobbling not needed.”

This highlights a fundamental problem I’ve seen with Audioscrobbler from the very beginning: in their quest to prevent spam, they prevent data from getting into their system in the first place, instead of storing the data and applying spam filtering on what was received.

Imagine if instead of Gmail putting spam in a spam folder it simply rejected the message in the first place — sure, it works great in general, but it sucks for all those false positives, right? As a result this site has never worked for anything but the core use-case: someone who listens to their music only when sitting in front of a computer, where they have a live helper application watching their every play.

Because Last.fm outright rejects data that looks “spammy”, there’s no opportunity to correct it when, in fact, it was system-, computer-, or even user-error. That data is lost for good. I’ve had days of listening lost like this because just one play on a desktop had been “newer” than my iPod sync, and the program thought I was trying to sneak extra listens in.

But this is the wrong way to run the service because not only does it severely punish the user for common mistakes, but it forces them to change their behavior on how they consume music to meet Last.fm’s strict patterns — just so they can’t spam the service and manipulate the overall charts. Not to mention, there’s an extremely easy way to handle that: it’s called sandboxing. Does it look like spam? Don’t count it. But don’t throw it out either. Put it in a space that can be counted for the user, but doesn’t affect someone else’s stats.

So we’re back at the quote at the top of the page. In a rush to keep duplicate entries from getting into the system, it falsely assumes the tracks were already submitted just by looking at the iPod itself and nothing else. Of course, Mobile Scrobbler keeps its own log and preferences on the device. There’s probably some magic it can do to see if Mobile Scrobbler was on, or if the tracks it was about to scrobble were logged as scrobbled by the app, but hell, it’s not even doing a good enough job to see if the app itself is still installed on the device. If Last.fm could sandbox submissions, it could submit those tracks and then see that, hey, those tracks were never actually submitted, so let’s keep them around after all. Instead, I just lost three days of tracks.

I should be used to this. It’s happened before. This is what I wrote in 2006 on this very same issue:

I literally think “Oh my god, did I update the iPod?!” before playing files in iTunes. Three or four days of straight iPod listening would be erased in a heartbeat because of a careless what’s-that-song-again double-click on the computer. This is a horrible thing to feel and I’m so glad to have finally stopped caring enough about my profile to finally get away from it.

And to the use-case point, I immediately got a nasty comment from some freetard saying that I should stop whining that the site makes me do things their way, and that I should just write my own.(1)

Having been a user of the service for over five years total now, I’m finally ready to toss the entire thing to the curb. This doesn’t need to be the end, however, but it requires Last.fm to stop treating all users like spammers, and actually build some real intelligence into track submissions and chart creation.

(1) Oh yes, as a working IA professional, a former employee of a Webby-winning music portal, and a passionate user of social media, I am more than ready to write an alternative. VCs or startup CEOs, give me a call. I’ll hook you up for sure.

A funny thing happened to me recently: after being contacted by Nokia WOM World about testing out a N95-4 — The US edition of the N95 8GB — I was then contacted by Shozu to inform me that I had just won one of them by taking part in one of their surveys. (Lesson being, having an offer in a survey works for everyone!) Naturally, I wrote WOM World back to tell them to move on to the next blogger on their list… but of course, I still planned on writing about the differences in the phone. (Again, works for everyone!)

Really, who needs another unboxing/side-by-side photo gallery of these two phones? There are loads of them out there; in fact, here’s the standard vs. 8GB N95 photos you may need to reference for my post, if you’re not familiar with the phones. But like I said, I just plan on writing about it.

(Just to note, there were many changes between the original N95 and the N95-3 when it was finally released for the States, and the N95 8GB models share those improvements. So you won’t be reading much about, oh, the loss of the camera lens cover or the extra memory because the N95-3 had the same adjustments.)

When the phone finally arrived, I migrated myself off the N95-3. While the Switch app in the phone worked great for moving Notes and SMS/MMS between the two, I did not move any Contacts or Calendars data. I let a round-trip through iSync handle that, since I consider my Mac to be the master source of such data, and iSync is such a great app. (I did need to download a new driver for the 8GB from the Nokia iSync page first, but that took no time to do.)

Bookmarks copied over but they did not show up sorted the way I had them originally, and as you may know, reordering bookmarks is extremely cumbersome in S60 because of its mark-then-command model combined with the Bookmarks commands being in a sub-menu. S60 menuing is almost always contextual, so I did not understand why some of these commands weren’t surfaced higher once bookmarks were selected (This is a subject for another post, however).

Now that I was up and running, I was struck by how similar they are overall. The screen is bigger, but only slightly so, and while I did feel like the screen was now easily equal-to (if not better) than one on an iPod classic, it didn’t feel so superior to the N95-3’s that it made me say wow or anything. It is definitely nicer to look at, to be clear, but it’s just a modest increase. I think some people say that it has a new daylight-readable screen, but I would have to take their word for it. It was a little easier to read, maybe, but in most of those situations there still is enough overall light and glare to make the screen hard to read, like any other electronic device in the sun. So while there is a little more heft to the N95-4, there was no major moment where I really felt like I had a totally new phone in my hand — the feel is that close. For obvious reasons.

The other big hardware difference are the keys on the face of the device. While the tactility of the keys are vastly improved over the N95-3, they are smaller and more cramped, making them a little hard to press accurately. This may be something I get used to, because I had similar reactions to the -3’s keys when I first got it, but they no longer get in my way.

The directional key is the most improved, finally feeling like its edges are raised enough to get a thumb on it quickly and move it easier. The center button also feels taller and is easier to press. Overall, gaming on this phone will get a little boost over the N95-3 because of these directional key improvements.

The menu and multimedia keys are also rounded and raised, which helps since they are much smaller. This is a big difference from the N95-3, where these buttons were treated more like negative space within the perimeter of the other buttons on the phone’s face. I miss those larger, flatter keys mostly because of the differentiation of feel and what that meant (these were modal buttons whereas the others were commands) but again, not a problem… just a preference.

However, I do think the soft keys are too small. Really. Most of the times I hit the soft keys to accept dialogs or unlock the phone and I don’t actually believe I pushed them, because they just don’t “give” enough when pressed and I don’t feel like I pressed on them directly.

On the whole, that was it. Most everything else was improved, and they were really the small software touches that a new firmware might have brought to the N95-3. For example, podcasts would now remember their playback point if you stopped them earlier. No more would I need to memorize a timecode and fast-forward through an hour to get back to where I was. And I even like the new panel system that the multimedia key launches. However, there are still bugs that have been left undone, such as requiring a data connection when reading downloaded RSS feeds: if there is an embedded photo, the phone will try to connect, but if you cancel, the Web Feed application QUITS. It doesn’t just let you read the feed WITHOUT PHOTOS.

The biggest thing to note is that is has Flash Lite 3, which means Flash Video support in the browser. However, leaving Flash fully-enabled made the browser crash on almost every Flash-heavy page I visited. Changing it to “images only” still allows you to click on Flash embeds and play the file in-page or in the Flash Player app on the phone, which worked much better. But desktop oriented Flash on a phone sized device is just not satisfying and not a good experience — choppy, slow, wrongly sized. For the desperate it will work, but it’s more of a back-up “just in case I have to access a Flash-driven site” type of feature. But it’s honestly just not that useful or necessary a feature.

I have yet to fill up the -3’s memory card, so doubling my card into 8GBs of built-in storage hasn’t been a notable change to me at all. Really, I have never swapped multiple memory cards into any device. I buy one card per each, be it a Memory Stick Duo for the PSP, or my CF card for my SLR, and it stays in the device all the time unless I’m transferring files to my computer and I couldn’t find a USB cable. I’m also not one of those people who travel with two or three cards for a device, so the fact that the N95-3 has a MicroSD slot wasn’t more valuable to me in comparison to a phone with non-upgradable storage.

So overall: the N95 8GB is a great phone, but it’s only a modest upgrade from the N95-3. You’re not going to miss out too much except for the software updates, which could still come to -3 if Nokia ever gets their ass in gear. It comes down to the memory card most of all, and if you have money invested in MicroSD, then your choice should be pretty clear.

More to come.

Recently, the use of the Nokia 770 as a simple drawing tablet struck me as a great use of the recently discounted gadget. I would draw up some ideas, and use Tumblr’s image-upload-via-email feature coupled with Sketch’s send-in-email command to publish them. Of course, I ran into a problem — the images didn’t appear with my posts.

After several days of poking around, I tracked down the problem: any PNG file generated from Sketch is given a “.sketch.png” extension. Always. And once a file has this extension, it is assigned a “sketch/png” MIME-type, not “image/png” which would be the default for PNG images, or even “application/x-sketch-png” which would still be unofficial, but at least follow standard MIME-type conventions for application-specific names.

Just to note: MIMEs were designed to be very flexible. Collisions with file extensions happen, where .XLS doesn’t mean Excel Spreadsheet but means eXtensible Library Sequence or some other custom format (although this has improved in recent years now that we’ve moved past DOS and the dot-three file extension). But that’s why MIMEs came to be, because there’s no guarantee that “sketch/png” is even the same kind of data as “image/png”. In fact, based on the naming convention, it’s explicitly denying that it’s an image.

As far as I can tell, they mistakenly assigned these types because they assumed that those final three letters were unique to an image file, and that even if the MIME is unrecognized by other systems, they would naturally just know it’s an image by its name. Basically, Nokia never left the land of DOS, even though they’re rooted in Linux and the device is an “Internet Tablet.”

The worst part is that there’s really no reason for Sketch to do this. Sketch does not save any application specific metadata into its files — they are really just vanilla PNG images. In fact, the only reason this would be done is so the 770 itself would know the difference between a plain PNG and one created by Sketch. That way, if I selected “Open” from the file browser, it would choose Sketch over the standard Image viewer which would only display the image and not let me edit it.

But hold on a second — why wouldn’t I want to draw on existing photos? That sounds like fun! Why wouldn’t I simply want to browse my sketches either? Sketch is only an editor — I can’t freely browse everything in it, plus if I accidentally make a modification to it, I’m always dismissing a Save dialog when I close it. And by its own logic (since you cannot edit dot-extensions on the device) it could easily sort the two apart if needs be using the extra “.sketch” it adds to the file name.

The real problem here is that Nokia chose to create a end-user distinction that wasn’t really necessary in the first place. After all, they didn’t name the app “Photos” (there’s no camera lens/app in the device). Let all images be Images — photos or hand-drawn — and let us decide if we want to start from a blank slate, or add LOLCaptions on our pets or friends.

That way, you don’t have to make up non-standard extensions like “sketch/png” in the first place.

By the way, if you haven’t tried using Tumblr, I highly suggest you do. Not only is the product great, but the support ain’t bad either. :)

Mobility Phillipines has a good overview of some of the cool features of the Nokia web browser, but it misses a very unique one that I haven’t seen implemented before on a cell.

Even though the Nokia browser (which is based on Safari WebKit/KHTML) renders images and styles as if it were a standard desktop browser, it will flow wrapped text to the width of the phone’s screen.

This means text elements will inherit a certain aspect of that “let’s fit everything in one column” approach that browsers like Opera Mini provide, but without breaking the overall look and layout of the page.

More importantly, it makes it possible to read a normal web page without horizontal scrolling. I know Windows Mobile IE has a “real web” browser and I would imagine they’d do something similar today, but in my earlier experiences which these sorts of clients, a “real” web page rendering required endless back-and-forth horizontal scrolling to read through, and as far as text goes, that pain has been eliminated on the Nokia — It’s pretty damn sweet.