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I’ve kept this in a drawer at home, for when a guest comes over and wants to charge their Nokia.
It hasn’t been out of the drawer for a long while so it’s going in the e-waste collection today.
As it happens, I have a personal story about what happened to Nokia. Here goes...
It hasn’t been out of the drawer for a long while so it’s going in the e-waste collection today.
As it happens, I have a personal story about what happened to Nokia. Here goes...
So it’s 2008 and I have the incredible good fortune to be at the CHI conference in Firenze, the birthplace of the renaissance. CHI stands for Computer-Human Interaction. It’s an amazing conference with some incredible people there:
For example @wasbuxton was there, a pioneer of multi-touch, showing how he was instilling a new kind of product oriented research culture at Microsoft Research. They’d just started showing the Microsoft Surface, which was then a magnificent Big-Ass Table, for researchers only.
Bill was presenting with @SaulGreenberg2 on their paper “Usability evaluation considered harmful (some of the time)”.
Word was the paper was so controversial that the jury only approved it on condition that a panel be held to discuss the issues it raised.
https://prism.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/handle/1880/45915/2007-879-31.pdf
Word was the paper was so controversial that the jury only approved it on condition that a panel be held to discuss the issues it raised.
https://prism.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/handle/1880/45915/2007-879-31.pdf
Of course @benbendc - inventor of Direct Manipulation, the UI paradigm that made our current computing paradigm and the one before it possible - was there. He would have been working on data exploration, following on from his groundbreaking work on Dynamic Queries.
CHI 2008 was paradise for an early career HCI researcher. We were swimming in ideas. Sessions had titles like “The Roles of Creative Synthesis in Innovation”, “Concepts and Tools for Multi-Device User Interfaces”, “3D User Interfaces: From Lab to Living Room”.
There was a beautiful special session on Randy Pausch, whose last lecture you should watch - it’s at http://thelastlecture.com and here’s the special session:
But most of all - Firenze was a fantastic location for CHI 2008. The city was inspiring, welcoming, full of wonderful places for students and researchers to gather for a meal and a drink and talk about what we were learning and figuring out. Which gets me to the story.
I had some friends at the MIT @medialab - a storied place.
As a kid I had been given a copy of @stewartbrand’s book “The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT” and it made what you might call a lasting impression. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38276
As a kid I had been given a copy of @stewartbrand’s book “The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT” and it made what you might call a lasting impression. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38276
Those friends introduced me to their friends from Media Lab Europe, which had recently shut down. When that happened many of them ended up at Nokia Research - Nokia knew great research talent and snapped them up. The night was warm and the Florentine beer was good.
These young designers and engineers from Nokia Research were... subdued. Apple had released the iPhone 10 months earlier. Nokia executives recognised the threat and had a pile of them shipped to Finland so they could try to understand them.
Or, you know, they could have had a jump on it a couple of years earlier, by visiting their own research labs.
This, not the arrival of the iPhone in itself, was what was getting the young Nokia researchers down.
This, not the arrival of the iPhone in itself, was what was getting the young Nokia researchers down.
Multitouch was not new, and HCI researchers and designers were already in love with it.
@wasbuxton gives a nice overview of the history here:
http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
The Nokia Research team knew its potential too. They’d been working with it.
@wasbuxton gives a nice overview of the history here:
http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
The Nokia Research team knew its potential too. They’d been working with it.
“The damned thing is”, one told me “we have had an all-screen, capacitive multitouch phone on the bench in our labs for *years*. Ours is better! But when we took it to the product guys they weren’t interested”.
“They told us their research shows no-one wants expensive phones. They have enough trouble selling a $50 handset, they just want to get it down to $5”.
The iPhone had launched at $499 with a plan (so really well over $1,000) and sold out.
The iPhone had launched at $499 with a plan (so really well over $1,000) and sold out.
I don’t know exactly what their prototype looked like. Perhaps something like the Nokia Gem concept phone from this video released in 2011.
The Nokia Gem is a lovely concept. The whole thing, front back and sides, is a responsive touchscreen.
The video shows a myriad of clever user interface ideas made possible by the form factor.
But it’s also clear that these are not complete, refined ideas.
The video shows a myriad of clever user interface ideas made possible by the form factor.
But it’s also clear that these are not complete, refined ideas.
The ideas are powerful but complicated, disunited. At one point in the concept video the user zooms in on a photo, first by moving a scroll thumb and then by pinching to zoom. As Steve Jobs would have said, “we only need one of these, right?”
Other concept videos from Nokia Research at the time are even more disjointed. They show devices driven by tech advances alone, without identifying user needs. There are long digressions into how cool nanotechnology is, nodding to the nanotech lab they were collaborating with.
But that wasn’t the problem with the multitouch prototype. These researchers were steeped in user-centred design and they had the beginnings of something important. They just hadn’t made it into a product, because that wasn’t their job.
(Dinner time - the story’s not over yet though!)
