Tailoring graphical user interfaces for everyday life

When developing a graphical user interface for a product, it's easy to forget the outside world; the reality that your product will ultimately face.
 
It's tempting to downplay the importance of various everyday situations. Mundane, boring and even stupid situations, that have nothing to do with your amazing new product; yet everything to do with how much user attention they require. This common and critical mistake results in a struggle between the product and the environment it's being used in. Below is a simplified example of this conflict (click to enlarge).

The image shows how the environment affects our ability to focus and handle information. The more control we have over the environment we're in, the more demanding interfaces we can cope with.

Mobile and portable devices are widely adopeted because they conform to dynamic and unpredictable qualities of human life. We naturally have a lower barrier toward carrying small devices with us. Therefore a smartphone is more likely to be used inside a taxing situation than a desktop computer.

On the opposite ends of that scale, we can either be fully engaged with the environment, or with the graphical user interface. Even a familiar and simple interface will be problematic in a demanding situation. Like composing an email while outrunning a bear. Similarly, any smartwatch interface feels lethally boring and restrictive, while waiting for another meeting to end (you'd rather tussle a bear). For reference, see the following image (click to enlarge).

Our available time, at any given moment, affects what we consider important. When a situation requires any attention, completing another task will costs you situational control and awareness. The expense amount depending on both interface needs and the task complexity in question. In short, if you text and drive, you'll suck at both. Human multitasking in all its glory.

Therefore it's important for interfaces input requirements to scale accordingly. The problem is that many interfaces today, like Android, iOS and WP, are already beyond their capability to do so, forcing the user to give in. The reason is a devious one. Even if people don't like to carry around tower PCs, they still love the familiar interface logic derived from them. Even though many human interaction methods, that were developed for desktop computing, are far too demanding for the life outside those cubicles they were never meant to leave.

The smaller your product is, the more focused, effortless and fault tolerant the interface needs to be. I know that our work on Sailfish OS is not there yet either, but it's still easier to keep on building it on top of thoughts like these.

A mobile device that fits your life, is valuable. One preventing you from living yours to the fullest, is not.


Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

What is keeping Sailfish OS alive

Image by Jolla

In my previous post, I used Windows phone as an example of how focusing too much on design can hurt your product. This post is a follow-up for it, focusing on the importance of design intentions and the overall reasons to do things in the first place.

Be realistically ambitiuos

For the sake of comparison, let's pretend that Jolla chose the strategy everyone expected it to choose: follow iOS and Android to join the mobile OS and smartphone business. Just close your eyes, and picture Jolla offering the same experience what Apple, Samsung and others already do.

Wonderful, here's the thing: that strategy has been perfected by Apple, Google (later Samsung et al.) since 2005. They will keep doing so in the future, without any intentions of slowing down. 7 years later Jolla was ready to compete against industry giants, with the announcement of Sailfish OS.

Enough pretending. Competing with this strategy, against these guys, is like trying to race against a bullet train, with a bicycle, without pedals. You will get nowhere; even if you pretend to. It's utterly silly to think you can beat them in their own game they've rigged beyond recovery.

You'll be spending all your time on things you can't compete with. And since everything you implement has a cost, it's more logical to find a simple solution for all those things that make your product a reality. Move through the mandatory feature list as fast as you can, so that you can save time and effort to use on what, in your vision, makes you relevant.

This is where Microsoft stumbled. WP tried to create value too close to competition, instead of building on top of and strengthening existing ones; those that made Microsoft relevant. In the end WP sabotaged Microsoft's opportunity to not limit its users to stationary computing. Their ambition to build a smartphone OS ended up instead limiting people also on the go. Looks like they're finally fixing this with Windows 10, so let's move on.

Be honest to what you exist for

Three years after the Windows phone launch, Sailfish OS rolled out as a very limited and rough experience. You were all set, if you had enough interest and patience to wade through tutorials, reviews and forum posts. It worked if you knew exactly what you were doing, but it didn't leave any room for user errors. There was hardly any guidance to help user. To be open about things, we shipped it with a beta stamp. Digital pioneers and average consumers alike received their copy, installed on the finest hardware we had access to; a mid-range phone on all accounts. A failure by industry standards.

But the thing is, we're not competing solely within industry standards; things what others already master. We have our minimal solutions for those, but our real business is where others cannot easily go. Either because they're too scared, lack the required vision, or don't really care as long as they can convince people buying their next wave of latest and greatest.

People deserve more natural and focused interfaces than current industry standards require. We need more openness, collaboration and sustainability =  a thorough value domain reset. Automation and computing in general are less about the technology, and more about finding a common direction to increase human potential; everyone deserves more time for things that are defining humanity.

What makes Jolla and Sailfish OS relevant, is our reasons to exist in the mobile space, and what our actions stand for in contrast to the competition. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what keeps Sailfish OS alive. Not what it can directly offer, because it's not much at the moment. There's a mountain of work remaining -- actually -- make that two mountains; the operating system alone is not what you need for your computing tasks. It's merely a start.

We still need apps, more supported services and other natural functionality integration points. They are paramount in making sure Sailfish OS also stays relevant. There's a big functionality debt we owe our community. It's through their passion and trust, that we've given this chance to make a difference.

Respecting that debt would not only be human, but also an exception that this industry sorely needs to change.


Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

The story of SailfishOS browser

Why on earth would someone start yet another browser project, when there's so many already out there? Well, because all mainstream browsers are more or less scaled down desktop browsers, than something designed with one handed mobile use in mind.

Looking at the image above, the two examples from the left are impossible to comfortably use without altering your hand grip. Also the reason for such design is obvious just by looking at desktop browser interfaces: they hardly need to be operated with one hand alone. I mean, try lifting your desktop/laptop with one hand, and enter a website address.

Even if you can somehow do it, it's not comfortable; and downscaling that interface design to 5" screens does not change that. You'll still need both hands to operate it, which is an unacceptable requirement for a simple tool that should increase your potential, not decrease it.

And that's where the third example on the right comes to play. Obviously, we're not doing everything by ourselves. We chose to build our web browsing experience on top of Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine, developed for the Firefox browser.

Then, let's look at the two major steps we took before ending up with the current SailfishOS browser design. There's some good things we learned along the way.

Version one

In addition to moving the toolbar down, the first design (click to enlarge) used separate pages for both tabs and website address. The aim was to avoid the performance hungry scenario, where some web content is rendered in the background, a virtual keyboard is open, and there's search suggestions on top of everything.

The toolbar had buttons for back, address field, tabs, reload/stop and forward. In the end, the design was discarded as too complicated to understand. The root cause was in the magnifying glass icon. People didn't associate it to searching the web.

Version two

The next image shows the design that actually shipped with the Jolla phone sales release (click to enlarge). It combined both tab and addres entry into a single page. And instead of a separate address eentering icon, it promoted easier bookmarking.

We got a lot of negative feedback for that design, as it added an extra step to searching something or entering page address, and also made tabs functionality unnecessarily complicated to understand, use and develop.

Version three

The current design brought back separated tabs and address entry points. Tabs still use a page, but the latter one behaves like a toolbar extension, so that you can still see a bit of the webpage underneath. Much more useful functionality was also added throught the expanding/collapsing toolbar.

The feedback has been really good, and although I'm not completely happy about two different gestures to get back to browsing (flick address overlay down to close it vs. flick tabs page right to close it), we're much closer to a modern mobile browser interface.

Something that supports the way your hand works, instead of how you moused around in desktop interfaces few decades ago.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

Sailfish OS growing pains

A pain that either forbids you from falling asleep, or aprubtly cuts your awesome dream short during the night.

It's your your junior legs that are hurting from a reason neither your parents nor doctors really know. A painkiller, accompanied with some medical jargon, is all that you're administered with. Followed by reassuring words about things getting better over time. And they do, because such are growing pains.

The Sailfish OS 2.0 demo software made its debut in Barcelona, at the Mobile World Congress. It got amazing reception from both Jolla booth visitors and media. It even landed us an award for the best tablet in show. However, our community and early adopters are not your average group of enthusiasts. Not too long after first hands-on videos reached youtube, various social media threads about missing features were open for business.

It's no wonder. That's the risk of demoing unfinished software publicly. But there's a solid reason behind us doing so. When it's your turn to be in the showroom spotlight, in-between some billion dollar companies with their competing products, you need to make everyone experience the end result. And demo software has the exactly opposite emphasis compared to something you use on a daily basis.

The demo software had to piggyback on easy and familiar features people can immediately recognize, understand and remember. Not on groundbreaking things that reboot the mobile computing or touch interaction, because those things require time to materialize during actual use. For someone already familiar with Sailfish OS, the demo software lacked many features that really add to the long term user experience.

But at the end, we didn't go to MWC just to show another product we've made. We didn't go there to show what we've done so far. We were there to represent everyone who has ever supported us. To make sure your decisions and voices count. This is a movement instead of technology. It's more human than anything else out there, so it has all the potential to grow to the right direction.

Even if it hurst a little.

I'm going to end with reassuring words about things getting better over time. And they do, because such are growing pains.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

4 design tips for edge gestures

This post is continuing my earlier article on harmonizing touch screen gestures.

Look closely at recent apps and mobile operating systems. Swiping over the screen edge to trigger navigation related action, is becoming increasingly popular. No wonder, as edge gestures are fast and comfortable way to interact with your mobile app or device. They have a huge potential in them, but only a fraction of it has been put into use.

It's not all unicorns, rainbows and marshmallows, though. These hidden gestures come with major drawback in discoverability and variation in use. Here's few tricks how to improve the way edge gestures can be put to use.

1. Keep it simple, consistent and fit for one hand.

I can't stress this enough. The less there's to memorize, the faster it's to master. Eliminate exceptions and special conditions when an edge gesture is not working, or does something completely different. Focus on a robust gesture recognition, and let the physical repetition do the work for you. It's like training in any sport, so make sure those training conditions are obvious to the user. Interfaces are just tools, and a good tool needs to be simple.

2. Think edges as physical buttons.

Edge gestures work especially well in controlling an operating system. A single edge gesture can be harnessed to perform similar kind of actions. For example, one edge can do things related to the power key (turn off screen, change profiles etc), while another one controls application window (minimize, close, windowed mode). Like in majority of other devices, notifications and whatnot could reside in another one.

So, with only three edges, an extremely competitive and simple interface can be built. If more than one action starts from the same edge, use absolute care in fine-tuning the feedback for it. The finger movement needs to feel different for your brain to associate them to their corresponding actions. Traveled distance, change in direction, speed or physical location, are all your usual suspects for separating them. Keep it simple, and prioritize the most used action.

The relation to hardware buttons helps people understand the idea behind it much better. Memorizing actions becomes faster and more natural, when there's a familiar relation between them. The reason for some actions not being available becomes more obvious that way. Take application window controls as an example. They are only available when there's an application window on the foreground.


3. The edge feedback is everything.

Just like with any other interactive elements, when user interacts with the edge, there should be an appropriate feedback on it. This is important for many users not familiar with interactive edges. Gestures in general can be performed so fast, that it's a good idea to keep the interacted edge highligted even after the gesture has been succesfully completed.

If your design uses gestures to control the application content, having different transitions for edge gestures and application content gestures is an advisable idea. It's a valuable difference to tell the two appart. After all, if edge gestures control the system level navigation, the feedback should be different than the application level navigation. Let's look at the hint animation for unlocking a smartphone as an example.

If you want to use edge gesture to unlock, you should direct attention to the interaction area. If everything moves (right side example), it implies parallel navigation (like going through images in gallery) instead. If you have plans for any lock screen controls (phone call controls, maps, flashlight, audio playback), you most likely should reserve that center screen flick for such actions.


4. Edge notifications and toggles.

This kind of edge indication can be used in several different ways to draw user attention to it. It can be indication of new content, or simply a reminder for a new user, that an edge gesture exist. The catch is that it doesn't introduce a tappable object on top of a keyboard or other interactive elements.

Since user is not able to control when someone sends a message to them (or when the system decides to emit one), it's annoying when a banner appears on top of link, only milliseconds before user touches it.

However, if the notification access is tied to the edge interaction, your tap will be registered by whatever it was intended for. The duration can also be shorter to avoid banners loitering on your screen for too long. You anyway know where to check those notifications.

Finally, if you want your edge to function as a toggle, the edge indication should also behave as one. This means that subsequent swipes across that edge turn the edge indication "on" and "off" again. Just like tapping on a regular toggle switch would.

The cool thing with edge toggles is in the effortless way to control it, compared to traditional notification panels. Those you need to close with the an opposite edge gesture, which require considerable thumb mobility to perform with a single hand.

With these tips, you should be able to considerably increase edge gesture benefits, while avoiding the common gesture pitfalls that plague major operating systems and applications.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

To evolve, or not to evolve?

That's not even a question.

Be it building shelters, gathering food or traveling long distances; people always had an innate desire to do things better and faster. It's been always possible to improve some part of an activity or a tool related to it. Even entire professions have been forgotten after becoming obsolete. Thanks to the increasing pace of technological advancements, our children won't anymore recognize objects their parents grew up with.

Except when it comes to user interfaces.

I grew up with computers around me, and my kids will grow up with even more computers around them. Over the years, they've gotten a lot smaller and immensely more powerful. What hasn't really changed, is the graphical user interface staring back at us. The desktop metaphor with windows, icons, menus and a pointer (WIMP) has stayed intact for over 40 years.

The first mobile devices had no touch screens, and had to be navigated with either directional keys or a scroll wheel. It was logical to use the same approach for such a miniaturized desktop, but when touch screens became more popular, user could directly interact with things. This made controlling a pointer redundant.

After the mouse pointer was removed and touchable things made a bit bigger for suitable finger operation, everything was ready for profit-making. Nobody seemed to question, whether an interface paradigm originally designed to be operated with a keyboard and mouse (WIMP), was really applicable for a mobile touch screen use:

Unlike desktops, mobile devices

• are primarily used without a supporting surface (table or similar)
• are used in dynamic environments with disruptions
• can't assume user is constantly looking at the screen
• can't assume both hands are available for a basic operation
• can't assume equal amount of time is available to perform a task

Regardless, all mainstream mobile operating systems treat mobile use the same way as desktop use. The familiar button-based navigation model, dating back 40 years, does not really qualify for mobile use. It requires too much attention from it's user to be efficient. Too much precision to be comfortable. Too much time to be fast.

Replacing mouse and keyboard with touch alone, just decreases the speed user can control the system, making it actually worse than the desktop. It's been a wobbly decade of mobile user interface infancy. The only way it's gotten any better, is through nicer visuals and smoother transitions. But that's just surface - a better hardware clad in finer clothes.

At this rate, my grandchildren can still identify an Android phone, because baby steps were considered good enough. That's a valid strategy as long as everyone copies one another, and no alternatives exist: a family tree that looks like a ladder. It's an open invitation for smaller companies to deliver less inbred products, that are designed to adapt to your life, instead the other way around.

If you still think those archaic desktop conventions are enough to keep your massive software business afloat today, you're not the first one. The bad news is, that the only way a dinosaur could avoid extinction, was to stop being one, and evolve into something else.

Before it was too late.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

What if game controllers were designed like smartphones

Sometimes, we find products that are carefully designed with human body limitations in mind. And sometimes products go to market with utter disregard to how and where people use them.

I started wondering how would it look if, for example, a game controller would be designed without actually thinking how our hands interact with it. Here is an existing smartphone, next to a made-up game controller:

Click to enlarge

Obviously, that wouldn't really work out for any gamer, since your thumbs would be functioning on their movement range limits most of the time. It would be painful in two ways: one, your hands would be killing you even after a short session. Two, in an online game, everyone else would too. As a gamer, I'm glad we don't have such controllers, but sadly we have phones that are painful to use with one hand. And that's killing me.

Naturally, I'll just go ahead and flip that around. Here you can see the same focus to ergonomics that's applied to existing game controllers, going into a smartphone interface design. To most of you, it looks familiar:

Click to enlarge

Just like that, we can play games and use smartphones as much as we like without collateral thumb damage. And trust me when I say this, we clock in some impressive amounts per day on both. Something that smartphone interface designers in the past didn't take into consideration.

Or chose to ignore.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

Follow-up: Why the status bar has to go

My earlier post, about calling a persistent status bar a ghost of desktop days, got somewhat mixed reception. I was mainly talking about individual details, and forgot to summarize the big picture.

I'd like to take another swing at the topic from a less technical angle, by asking why do we own smartphones?

Everyone uses them to communicate with people important to them. We use them to consume content through any channels available. We all have slightly different ways we use them. Others take things further, while the rest settle for less. But everyone has one thing in common;  we all do it on the go.

We pay money to carry a piece of technology around all day, to do all these things when we want to. The value comes from the device enabling communication, access to information and entertainment. It exists so that we don't have to be tethered to our grampa's box all the time.

I don't understand why are we required to babysit our devices all day, using that small bar at the top of the screen?

When facing a critical error, all smartphones have that "I just soiled my pants" -look of a small child on their faces. But children are much easier to debug, because all issues are local. With cellular reception woes, the catastrophe can occur in places you don't even know that exists. You're only left with the stink.

We must stop traveling a road, where you have to keep one eye on the status bar and one on the content. We can't live under a constant fear of our devices jumping off a cliff the moment we're not able to see the status bar. It's a UX shot so wide, that you could park Jupiter with its moons between it, and the "smartphone" target you we're aiming at.

Making better products and better software is not easy, and will only happen gradually. Nobody makes software that behaves badly on purpose. It's bad because we, as users, are holding on to certain things extremely tight. We're constantly demanding more features on top of the old ones, without understanding the complexity it invites. Complexity in the software is the same for bugs, what blood in the water is for sharks. An open invitation to ruin your pool party.

That's why rebooting the smartphone value domain is important to see what is really needed.

Look at any, big, companies, that are throwing thousands after thousands of developers and testers at their software products, to keep the quality on an acceptable level. Even they struggle to keep the water safe for swimming. They're not bad at software, but their products are simply unwieldy.

And they're complex because we demand them to be. So make sure you demand only what you really need, because it will affect with who you're sharing your swimming pool?

Is it with people important to you? Or with bunch of f*cking sharks?

The decision is yours.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

Ambience: the story behind Sailfish OS looks, part 2

In the previous part, I went through the reason to not follow what other mobile operating systems do, and stay away from a static interface style. The main problem with themes, is that they just alleviate the real problem of interfaces being static, because someone wanted it to look the same for everyone.

Instead doing small things here and there, we wanted to build the personalization story around a single strong feature. The most used way to customize a device yourself, is to change the wallpaper. But we didn't want to stop there -  we wanted the wallpaper to signify how the device currently works.

To do that, it should affect also to how individual applications look. This naturally allows the image to carry more meaning to its owner than meets the eye of an outsider. The feature was named as Ambience, which means atmosphere, surrounding, mood or environment of a given place.

Here's some examples. These are screenshots of my lock screen, home screen and calculator app (click to enlarge them). In the first set, I have created an Ambience out of Orion nebula photo, and set the device to not emit any sounds when that Ambience is active. You can see the selected image being visible throughout the interface, from lock screen to the calculator.

Alright, unto the next set. This time I have selected an image that shows a circuit board as Ambience motif. More discrete ringtones and notification sounds are defined to fit my working mood and prevent disturbing others. It's easy for me to tell apart green and red interface as they carry added significance for me (both photos are personally relevant for me, and I have defined the behavior for each Ambience). Red is silent, green is discrete. No need to squint at tiny status bar icons.

Moving on to the third set, where I used an abstract macro photo to create my casual Ambience. When activated, ringtones and volumes reflect my preferences for events, going out with friends, or just idling at home. Again, it's trivial for the owner of the device to understand the device behavior through meaningful images and colors instead of minuscule status icons.

To create a new Ambience, all you need is a large enough image. Download one from web, use camera to capture something nice, or create a unique piece with your favorite illustration software. With a little bit of testing, anyone can do it. Results will often surprise you. It's an invitation to explore how different kind of images work and shape the appearance of your device. Use images relevant to you, don't follow but pave your own style. Be playful and try different things. Delete the bad ones and enjoy keepers.

Sailfish OS Ambience journey has just barely started and currently only includes partial sound settings. To get some idea what could be done with it in the future, take a look at what our community has already proposed. In short, it's like a visual umbrella for grouping any kind of behavior you might frequently need to change based on context.

How you make use of it, is up to you. After all, it's your personal device. And this time around, it really means it. The way your phone looks like, is not shared by anyone else.

Each Sailfish OS device is unique in that sense. Reflecting their users.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

Ambience: the story behind Sailfish OS looks, part 1

As a part of our daunting task of creating a new mobile operating system, a visual story (theme) for the user interface was needed. What that usually meant in the past projects, was a ton of work containing:

• appearance for system UI (things that's part of the OS itself like home, lock etc.)
• appearance for each application UI building block (buttons, sliders and switches etc.)
• launcher icon style (how app icons stand out and represent the app itself)
• generic icon style (iconography used across the OS and apps) 
• creating graphical assets for actual implementation of system interface and application UI building blocks
• document how everything is implemented correctly (fonts, colors, geometry, transitions, interaction feedback etc..)
• continuously work on the documentation to fix mistakes, partial details and oversight
• add new features and update existing ones in your documentation

In most cases, one or two design teams are working on this huge pile of things. Team compositions are usually something like this:

• few chiefs for planning, leading, reviewing and managing the work
• some seniors for heading key areas
• a lot of designers to execute the design and deliver it to be implemented. Usually one per application. 

That easily means work for 15-25 people. At the time when we started, we had 2. We couldn't really continue the Nokia N9 style, due to both the amount of work required (see above) and it was still part of Nokia's brand. Same restriction applied for going for Android or iOS -copycat style. Too much to do. The amount of work needed to define, implement and maintain such an UI style, would've burnt us up in no time. Not to mention delivering something like that, understaffed, with a competitive quality. We went the opposite way, do as little design as possible.

The current Sailfish OS visual appearance was born out from the idea, that it's not the interface that matters, but what's around it; starting from the user. The more we could capture that, the less visual design would be required.

Let me open that up a bit more. The less a designer dictates how an interface looks like, the more one leaves room for personal expression. The less you try to control everything, the more the interface can become adaptive, and to resemble its owner.

We didn't want to control everything in Sailfish OS. That's not what personal is about. We wanted to make it adaptive, so that every device would look unique through portraying something that's dear to the user. As a designer, you cannot decide what that something is. You need to let go and trust the user.

And we did. We didn't end up defining everything like the competition. We almost completely eliminated documentation overhead (we're not shipping that, but a product), and instead worked with the actual software. We crafted a rule-set for adaptive interface, and continue improving and developing our own personal story.

The Ambience story.

In the next part, I'll dive deeper into how the visual style works (with example pictures).

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

Why the status bar has to go

The small black stripe at the top of the smartphone of your choice. Home for various tiny icons. Through subtle changes in them, we can decipher what's going on under the hood.

To better understand the status bar we have today, we must look at the desktop computing environment where the convention came from. The following image illustrates how different common desktop environments have solved the status bar. Top or bottom, (left or right. Always visible by default.

That design somehow felt like the only possible solution that anyone could ever come up with. Whenever someone started to design an operating system, they first drew that familiar bar across one of the display edges. Just like small kids default drawing the sun into one of the top paper corners. Only with the difference that kids move on, discovering other possibilities for sun placement.

Then came the advent of smartphones. Everything we got used to in the desktop environment, had to be crammed down to a smaller screen. So that we wouldn't mistake it as something else than a desktop </sarcasm>. A ceremonial bar was again crafted across the top screen edge, to give permanent residence for status icons. And after repeating that design pattern countless times, we should realize that the advent is now gone. It's no more, and here's some further incentive:

• As a digital medium, software is dynamic in nature. A fixed or static layout is more a design decision, not a requirement. Displays also exist for dynamic content, and suffer from static one. If you haven't yet heard about screen burn-in, well now you have.
• A small bar is a compromise in legibility. To not waste screen space, the bar height is kept tiny. This results in uncomfortably tiny icons. Some have made the bar automatically hide, to not distract user, but have still kept the bar and icons tiny. Sigh.
• Lack of structure and meaning. On a small bar, all icons compete with each other for user attention. Since everything is visible all the time, a subtle change in one icon is easy to miss. All icons appear visually equal in importance, even if they rarely are.
• Technical overhead. This concerns mostly app developers, but they're users as well. No discrimination, please. Better developer experiences are needed as well. Controlling status bar visibility and behavior is yet another thing to be mindful when creating your application. Also the OS owner has to maintain such complexity. Both sides lose.
• Lost screen estate. Even if little, it all adds up. It's not really a full screen if something is reserving a slice of what would otherwise belong to your app. There is a dedicated full-screen mode in Android, further increasing the technical overhead and complexity, for both app developers and system maintainers.
• Information overload and "over-notifying". We're bad at focusing on multiple things at the same time. Status bar at the top is screaming for attention and every time you take a glimpse at it, you need to refocus back to the whatever you did before. It's important information no doubt, but user decides when.

Even if mobile devices are almost identical to desktops as computer systems, smartphones are used in completely different way, than stationary desktops and laptops. Smartphone use is mainly happening in occasional brief bursts, instead of long sessions (desktop). User unlocks the device, goes into an app, locks it again and repeats.

It's important to understand that there's a reason for the user to do that. The device is not the center of your life, and is put aside all the time, just to be pulled out again when required.

And before the user reaches that app (or notification drawer/view), several opportunities present themselves to expose user to the system status without the need to make it persistently shown. Like making it part of the natural flow of things.

That is exactly what Sailfish OS does. It solves the aforementioned problem by showing important system information as part of the home screen content, resulting in:

• Dynamic screen usage, behavior designed for displays
• Superior legibility due to larger icons
• More meaningful icons are emphasized, more layout possibilities
• Less coding leads to faster app development
• Single behavior is simpler to maintain from the OS side
• All apps are full-screen by default
• Less clutter, information is showed on demand

Don't blindly embrace a legacy design as an absolute truth. Make sure you define first what is the problem it solves. Rapid advancements in both software technology and mobile context understanding, can provide you great insight in finding alternatives that didn't exist back then.

And keeping in mind that mobile != desktop will alone carry you a long way. Remember that natural interaction in mobile context needs solutions that desktop didn't have to solve. Use your head.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

What's the sand in your sandbox?

I was picking up my son from the daycare when I realized something. It took me for a round trip to the days I started at Jolla.

It was early July 2012. I was very excited about everything I had learned about the company over those few months preceding my hire. I was looking at non-hierarchical and self-organized group of talented people; teeming of can-do-attitude, and plenty of enthusiasm to match. With very lean ways of working, Jolla was about to play ball with the big guys. It felt amazing, and I was all game.

I'm a person who lives to do things. I love to study things by taking them apart. Every disassembled object has a story to tell, and those stories feed my obsession to learn and understand how everything works. When other kids at daycare played with their toys, I had a bag full of broken household appliances and power tools to disassemble. As a courtesy of my parents. Otherwise I would've taken apart something that actually worked, much to the horror of my daycare teacher.

Countless dismantled things later, Jolla was the perfect do-all-you-can buffet for me. It was very informal and open 24/7. Everything in that buffet was optimized for doing things together. So many things to take apart an learn from. We all had done mobile operating system work before. This time we just had to do it with a fraction of the manpower, without any hierarchy and management overhead. And the best way to do that, is getting your hands dirty with it. Explore, play, take stuff apart and and put back together. Don't be afraid of mistakes, instead love them for guiding you.

I realized Sailfish OS was the sand in my sandbox. Days on end, I went in to make sense out of things. It was important to work closely with developers, so there was just us and the sand. No matter how long it took, we would keep our hands deep in the sand. It was wonderful that nobody cared if I had sand all over me. Learning and understanding was more important.

I climbed out of my car and closed the door. My son was waiting me at the daycare gate with a big smile - all covered in sand. He doesn't mind the mess. Because it doesn't qualify as one for him. Instead it represents an exiting interaction; a freedom to do anything he wishes. It dawned on me that some people have learned to avoid getting sand on them. For those, I have a secret to share: you can unlearn it.

Learn to tolerate that the sand is messy. It's the purpose of the sand to be all over the place. It's up to you to mold and craft it to whatever you wish. No right or wrong way exist. The only rule there is: you can't make great products without getting sand on yourself. Your ability to do amazing things is only backed up by your relationship with the sand.

So take a look at your sandbox. Whatever it is that sand represents for you, get to know it again. Don't be afraid to get some of it on yourself. Take a look how kids do it. They don't see a mess. They see fun.

So should you. It's time to reconnect with the sand again, just like back in your childhood. Smile follows naturally.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

Just asking - a new image series launched

Just asked myself,

Why not to squeeze some of the points I make in this blog, into images that are.. say.. more approachable? I thought it would be a good idea. So I ran along with it and made a few over the weekend.

These two (just added 2 more) are just the beginning of a wider series of images, that either ask a simple question or challenge something in the current state of the smartphone industry. I really want to do this just to see if it's something worth continuing.

As always, the goal is to increase the awareness of more natural user interfaces, through the work we've already done for Sailfish OS at Jolla.

Here's the link in case the Picasa flash plugin crashed and burned.

Anyway, let me know how these work out for you. Any comments or image ideas are also very welcomed, so I can crank out more - or stop immediately. If you already haven't, this is the perfect time to visit the comment section.

Fantastic. Let's do this, since we don't try in Finland.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

What's wrong with multiple home screens

Quite a bit. Hold on to something.

If thinking critically, what does multiple home screens really add? Aside from multiple screens off course. Is there any explanation for their existence?

I hear this even in my sleep already: "Everyone thinks they're amazing / Everyone is used to them." But, that's just repeating an opinion. It doesn't explain why do people need them?

Another common one is: "Statistics tell us that people like products with multiple home screens in them." With that logic, you can say that statistically people also like seats with feces in them, because they use bathrooms several times a day. Sorry, people would be happier without the poo being involved if it would be possible.

This as well: "We have done extensive consumer studies to prove it's a must feature to have." Sigh. On paper, you can make people like poo just by asking them the right questions.

This comes up every now and then: "It's for everyone to personalize their devices." I'm pretty sure the device is already a personal one, and what user does with it, will make it even more so. Also, there's countless other ways to make the interface a personal one.

But the winner is: "What is this heresy I hear! From the beginning of time as we know it, home screen content has always been arranged in horizontal pages!" From the beginning of 2007. But then why is pretty much every other content browsed in vertical direction? Web pages, content streams, call histories, messages and gallery grids. All vertically arranged.

So really. Why does a smartphone need multiple horizontally arranged home screens? How do they make a smartphone smarter? What is the user need they fulfill?

Anyone?

I think it's actually the other way around. A smartphone would be smarter if it didn't have multiple home screens. The main issue is in the thinking that adding more, automatically equals a better product. And as usual, people are blind to the opposite.

It's a better product, that equals more. Let's try it out.

You give a user seven home screens, instead of five. Did it make a single home screen any better? Is it easier to move or find things between seven home screens? Are seven screens easier to decorate with widgets? Is it easier to find nice widgets that don't look horrible? Is it more personal solution? Did the product become smarter than before? Does it free system resources for actual user tasks?

Nope.

Then try removing all but one home screen. Make that single remaining home screen better. Make it smarter. So that it adapts better to what user is actually doing with the device, removing the need to juggle between multiple home screens. Because everything you did and worked on, is found from the same home screen, everything becomes much faster. You launched a music player, and suddenly the controls are also there. You arrived at work and your email account summary is greeting you on your home screen. Suddenly the behavior feels more helpful and smarter, since you can do more by actually doing less.

Do you spot a pattern? Better, equals more.

There's even the age-old saying about quality trumping quantity. Well, marketing was clearly invented as an counter-argument. Because smart is hard to do. Just adding more is easy. A hammer with three heads instead of a single good one: a great idea everyone can boldly stand behind of. And with a good marketing campaign, nobody notices it's heavy as hell and unbalanced beyond practical. The rendering looks amazing, though.

So compared to doing smart and meaningful things, marketing is dirt cheap. Guess which path big manufacturers favor?

So let's try one more time: Does adding more home screens make a product easier to sell?

Hell yes it does!

If I buy a hammer, I want a better hammer than I had before. One that allows me to work faster, more efficiently and comfortably, not to forget improved safety. I don't want to buy an inferior hammer, just because it's easier to sell to other people; who at the end of the day, would also prefer a better hammer with a single good head, instead of having the option for multiple ones.

That means the product was intentionally made to perform poorly, just to make it sell more. Since the modular-wonder-hammer has the option to add more heads to it, the potential to develop a single good head is lost for the sake of a nonsense feature.

If Sailfish OS would have multiple home screens next to each other, it wouldn't be possible to have cover actions as explained in my previous post. It would mean that the ability for user to interact with tasks would be reduced.

For the sake of having a modular-wonder-hammer, that's heavy as hell and unbalanced beyond practical.

To be honest with all of you. Making a better product is really hard and painful. It's because the industry around you keeps repeating how more equals better. Especially when the rendering looks awesome.

The dumbest thing I've heard.

In the smartphone industry.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

Replacing widgets with minimized applications

One of the most unique aspects of Sailfish OS, are active application covers.

They're essentially small windows on your Home screen. Each one of them represents a minimized application (not currently in full-screen state). The same function is found from any desktop OS, in form of a task bar or an application dock, that show all your applications that are running in the background.

As you know, there's no separate task bar or switcher in Sailfish OS. Only one Home screen. These covers show relevant and legible information, and allow user to perform important actions directly from the home screen.

On the first encounter, they kind of come across like widgets. And it's no wonder, since they actually pull double duty. Primarily, they're used to maximize an application to full-screen, but also allow user to interact with common features without the need of entering the app.

When compared to for example Android home screen counterparts, similarities start to run shallow. Widgets on Android are not in the same place where active applications are shown, so there's no real connection between the two. Even if they also allow using common features, there's a problem with doing it with buttons. I made a simulated example below, about Sailfish OS having separate tappable areas.

Accurately clicking a correct physical location on the display is easy in a desktop environment, the birthplace of widgets. After all, mousing on a stable surface is a breeze. But when you're walking or otherwise active, the overall movement of your body easily transfers all the way to your hands, making it harder to tap the correct button. And just because this interaction method uses our fingers to emulate a mouse cursor, it's already by definition an inferior approach for mobile interfaces that are not used in stable environments.

Sailfish OS solves this by not using taps for cover actions at all. Instead, user flicks the cover horizontally to perform an action. This makes it irrelevant where you tap or flick a cover. Both tap and flick touch events can use the entire Cover area as a target. This makes a big difference in the accuracy requirement for performing an action.

Since it's the flick direction (left or right) that defines the action (media player play/pause and skip song for example), it naturally limits the maximum amount of actions into two. And since tapping and flicking to left or right all have a different effects on how, and in which order, your hand muscles behave; it's easier for our body to associate them for different things. Again, the design both supports and takes advantage of our unique capabilities.

Whether you use all the potential through these gestures or not, is up to you. Each of us takes tools we use to different levels of efficiency. Some push them all the way to their limits, while others are comfortable in casual use. Both are equally correct.

However there shouldn't be separate locations for these two ways of use. In Android, the requirement for widgets comes from the poor multi-tasking performance, as well as system complexity. It's nicer to have multiple home screens filled with widgets, where user can perform frequent tasks. However, that's just adding more complexity by fixing the wrong problem.

By solving how minimized applications allow different degrees of user focus, and reduce the need to enter an application, the need for a separate location for widgets is removed. It both makes the OS simpler and leaner, and greatly increases task handling speed, since various user needs can fulfilled in the same location.

Responding to user required level of efficiency and control.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.