Conference Dinner [mobile hci 2006]

The conference dinner was great fun last night. We boarded a boat near the Dipoli conference centre and cruised around to Helsinki for 1.5 hours, taking in a lot of the harbour. Dinner was at a restaurant called The Casino and there was a band playing on the shore as we arrived by boat. Dinner was lovely with the obligatory Finnish fish and some nice beef. There was white wine, red wine, muscat and an interesting liquor of Arctic Bramble Berry called mesimarja. Interestingly it made my teeth tingle. There was entertainment that was very interesting (a comedy band/show).

After the dinner we went into town to Zetor Bar, also known as the Tractor Bar. It was an interesting place (there were tractors inside), thought I can’t say I would strongly recommend it as it was a bit quiet and an older crowd. We moved on to another bar (on the other side of the park – don’t know the name), which was good fun with a lot more (younger) people and even a room that was supposed to play only Finnish music, though some how Michael Jackson was played as well. After that closed we wandered the streets looking for another bar, but to no avail. One thing we Australians have in common with the Finnish is the late night kebab (though it’s all on a plate, rather than wrapped in pita bread), so we finished the night in style….

Fell into bed at 4:50am

Technorati Tags: food, friends, funny, hci, industry, mobile, mobilehci2006, music, restaurant, travel

Nokia Keynote [mobile hci 2006]

The keynote on the final day was by Harri Kiljander, Director of Experience Design for Multimedia (N Series) at Nokia. This was something I was really looking forward to. Unfortunately, the presentation was more questions than answers.

Harri identified a range of issues that the industry is experiencing (complexity/feature bloat, lack of standards, justifying usability to the organisation etc etc), but didn’t talk about how Nokia is addressing those issues. In fact, he went on to say that Nokia are now trying to use the term Multimedia Computer instead of Mobile Phone and that this isn’t likely to be clear or customer friendly.

Harri used the same stats that I talked about in my slides for the AIMIA MCIDG Consumer Education launch a couple of weeks ago talking about the return rates of mobile phones with No Fault Found and the financial impact it has, but given the audience here it seems a bit like preaching to the converted.

I was talking to a friend after the talk and he was saying that Nokia is still a very engineering focussed company (something Harri also admitted) and that there is no-one who is at the C-Level in charge of the user experience. I’m surprised by this, given Nokia’s market lead is no doubt due to the usability of the devices and clear market feedback on phones like the Nokia 3650, but obviously they are assumptions on my part.

Technorati Tags: consumerelectronics, hci, industry, mobile, mobilehci2006, Nokia, ui, usability, web2.0

Panel – Collaborative Mobile User Interface Design: How should companies design the mobile user interface together [mobile hci 2006]

With a great topic and a panel that came from key mobile industry areas (network, handsets, UI design, tools, industry bodies), I was looking forward to this one.

It was the Chair’s first panel session he’s run and unfortunately he talked a lot about his own company for the first 30 minutes without involving the poor panelists who were left there sitting twiddling their thumbs. He then discussed all the in people involved in the industry at length, which I would have expected everyone attending this conference would have had a relatively good understanding of. Further, he then asked all the panelists to speak in turn, making it a lot of little talks rather than a panel discussion, until the end.

Anat from O2 provided some clear points of the aspects of the UI that are important to the network (hooks into core UI, flexibility with idle screen, good update mechanisms). Nokia simply said that they have to work with the networks and that everyone is in it for the money (I would have liked to here about how Nokia see their control of the experience and how their changes in UI design with companies have made real impacts to usage etc). Tomou emphaised the cultural issues for his company and the importance of trust and collaboration. Bruno provided some key information about the historic lack of standards and that they needed to be resolved.

I raised the question of what the industries expectations are around a more seamless end-to-end mobile customer experience (e.g. Helio, iPod). Currently mobile customers have a poor experience getting thrown between the network, the limitations of the handset, different UIs for the phone and content, poor configuration etc. But there wasn’t much of a response from the panel. I got some good feedback and agreement from other attendees after the panel, who also see this as a key concern for the industry. If Apple do make a mobile phone, many of these companies will be standing there with their pants down.

All in all I didn’t walk away with a great deal.

Technorati Tags: Apple, design, hci, industry, mobile, mobilehci2006, Nokia, ui, usability

Sometimes you forget where you are….

Soooo, I’m at the conference dinner last night and the guy next to me sits down and I notice that he has the Nokia 770.
Keen to engage and see what issues he has with the device after my experience the other day I say “So do you like the interface on the device?”
and he says:
“Yes, I designed it”

We get to go to the gadget lab at Nokia today

Technorati Tags: funny, hci, mobile, mobilehci2006, Nokia, travel, ui, usability

Best Mobile HCI presentations from Day 1 [mobile hci 2006]

The three stand out presentations from the first day of Mobile HCI were:
1. Hannu’s presentation on Mobile Game Usability Heuristics – Great talk that went some way in addressing the different nature of mobile games and how to evaluate them effectively.
2. Michael’s talk on enabling communications for mobile workers within healthcare environments – Interesting use of bluetooth headsets for nurses to communicate and use agent technology, though the nurses seemed to find the biggest benefit was simply being able to answer calls on the move. Good data reporting, very complete rounded presentation.
3. Scott’s talk on a usability benchmarking case study – This was a comparative study on downloading mobile content on a variety of mobile phones and US networks. Very good idea and something I will be looking into.

While I enjoyed Matt Jones’ keynote, I think it lacked cohesiveness and didn’t really inspire me the way I hoped a keynote on the future of mobile would.

Strangely, none of these talks were not nominated for best paper. It’s now half way through the second day, but I haven’t been as impressed today. This might be partly due to the cocktail party last night that progressed into town to the Torni (Tower) bar in town with a great view of the city.

Technorati Tags: hci, industry, mobile, mobilehci2006, Nokia, travel, ui, usability