26 February 2010

First Glimpse Of The
Symbian S^4 User Interface

Couple of week ago Nokia has submitted a proposal for a new framework for Symbian-powered UIs, to the Foundation’s open community and now we just got the first video demonstration of the Symbian S^4 user interface.

Sneak peek at the next gen Symbian user interface showed off a nice array of eye candy and some actually useful bits, like support for capacitive screens, multitouch, gestures, multiple desktop filled with widgets and advanced graphics effects that are scheduled to be in the release later this year.

Direct UI improves the competitiveness of the Foundation Platform by reorganizing and clarifying the feature richness of the software to improve access to and use of richly interconnected applications. Note that this UI Concept proposal institutes new design guidelines for S^4.

Layout simplification places first order commands (used most frequently by users) in the primary application view, second order commands under the Options menu or in Settings. End users can see the main commands of each application as soon as it is launched.

The titlebar is provided by the system and is the access to the Options menu. The number of commands in the Options menu is typically limited to 6 to prevent scrolling of the menu in landscape orientation. Cascading menus are permitted and there is no guideline limitation on extending the Options menu to a number of menus. However, the titlebar is supplied by the system and its real estate is not available to the application.

The titlebar reflects the application title. A label field placed immediately below the titlebar can indicate the user’s location in a hierarchy, and is typically used whenever the user enters a collection.

The number of layout files per application has been reduced: an application typically has 3-5 layouts including a list view, item view, and edit view. End users can easily recognize features and find them onscreen in a predictable location. The combination of these two factors streamlines the number of clicks to complete tasks.

A Context menu invoked by a long press to a list item provides an accelerator to commands located in the item’s full screen view. End users can access commands such as Delete Item without navigating to the item.

Screen real estate management is simplified by initially exposing application ‘chrome’ (titlebar area and optional toolbar) and autodismissing for media applications (chrome is reinvoked with a touch to the screen). Applications requiring fullscreen viewing can take advantage of autodismissing chrome. End users see the availability of controls and can easily invoke them; toolbars do not need to reserve persistent screen real estate.

The proposal references a pattern library that replaces the existing S^3 style guide. Current design guidelines are provided in the Symbian Devices Pattern Library (under development) and include interaction patterns and descriptions of available Orbit widgets. Previous User Interface Style Guides are deprecated.