14 July 2009

Behind the Scenes:
Developing Nokia's New Homescreens

Nokia N97 is the company’s first device that features a new and greatly improved interactive homescreen, which can be customized with a wide range of widgets that bring live information directly to the device.

These widgets include key social networking destinations like Facebook and Hi5, news services like the Associated Press, Bloomberg and Reuters, as well as shopping and weather information and here is the short video that sees designers Juliana Ferreira and Lee Cooper explain how Nokia went about designing the new homescreen as seen on the N97 and the methods and prototypes they used in their research.

"The homescreen appropriate way to personalize plethora of content that is meaningful to you. It allows people to make their products their own. We are building tools to enable people to make the products for themselves"

In terms of how the design team has approached investigating and developing Nokia’s new homescreens, including that of the N97, Juliana explains it’s a three-step process.

Firstly, the team keenly observed and gathered data on how people think about personalization in a number of counties including the UK, USA, China, Philippines, Brazil and India. These initial findings gave the design team insight into the global similarities and differences between people when it comes to personalization, culturally and beyond, spread around the globe.

For instance, one granular finding was that a worker interviewed in the UK and a rural worker in Nigeria shared the same interest of wanting to get the football scores for the Premiere League delivered to them - different lives and cultures, but some fundamental shared needs. The job of the design team is to address these sorts of micro needs in a flexible and effortless way, with the overarching solution being widgets and wallpapers, and enabling people to fully customize them.

So the second step in the process of designing the new homescreen was the exploration of concepts and prototypes. The team asked hundreds of people to create their ideal homescreen with paper prototypes, and found that no two homescreens were the same and that people want complete freedom to place stuff wherever they wanted. Personalization in practice saw people feedback with some interesting requirements, such as one guy who simply said “I really don’t want to hide by daughter’s face with email”. Fair point.

Plus, people called for widgets that would morph in size to make them more contextually relevant and significant when appropriate (something that isn’t in the current homescreen, but is being looked at). For example one person in the study was a Manchester United fan who said, “for that 90 minutes the football is on, I want to see the Man. Utd. widget as clearly as I can. It should be big while the game is on and smaller when it’s not”

Corralling all this information and feedback led to the final stage of validation and testing of the homescreen to make it seamless and effortless. Which is the stage we find ourselves at with the Nokia N97.