Science and Industry

New year and a new try with this blog. This time I could try to keep it really alive.

So, as you might guess from the topic, I’m speaking of the iPhone. I actually hit an argument whether iPhone is revolutionary or just evolutionary in Jaiku, but actually the topic comes from older news in Digitoday: “Nokia has missed the touch screens”

It’s true, Nokia doesn’t have touch screen as many of the rival devices; iPhone and G1 to mention some. Especially the iPhone discussion is interesting to follow here, as the user experience is said to be extreamly good.

So, all those who want to speak about touch screens and Nokia: I doubt if the touch component itself can make everything better. There’s more than just the technology: intuitiveness and easy to use. These can be done with old fashioned buttons too – try out some early 90′s phones here. It’s a lot in the mind set of application developers; do they want to make software beautiful to use.

What’s usually forgot in the Nokia vs. Apple touchscreen discussion is the fact that many other manufactures have had touch screen already way before Apple. Still, Apple is now seen as the rising star of mobile industry — and too often I hear that it’s due to the touch screen. But easy and fun to use user interface can be done with buttons too. The touch element is cool, but not critical. I think the main issue is user experience and how to simplify the technology. Waiting to try out the N97 and see what kind of approach they use there.

Actually, touch ui and thus touch screen allows many new interaction ways that are worth of investigating; but it’s not the only thing we should be looking for.

Author has used the original iPhone for some days to check it out and is looking forward to trial G1 also. What comes to my iPhone experiences — I don’t want to compare as the 3G version has e.g. official SDK for developing the apps, so one doesn’t need to use them over 2G like I did

I’m now in the warm sunny Finland… Well, it’s not raining which is a good thing. I got the permission to put this blog out and as I’m a bit too much excited I started to do it now and then the main view was a bit too empty to keep it that way.

Okay, I hope you noticed the two pages left: I’ll tell a bit of myself and then about this blog. As said, I’m a seasonal trainee in the huge corporation, but that really tells nothing of what I do. So… For the last month I’ve been in the services and software side, working on service metrics related problems and then helped the coders a bit with user interface giving my ideas and comments of their plans.

What service metrics really mean? Let’s take this slowly (as I’m a social scientist, too much technology talk might cause dizziness): every time you visit a web service something is logged into the system. The idea of the task given to me was that by going trough these logs we get some user patters and then analyze the needs a bit better and thus create a better service.

That was rather quantitative approach to user experience and I like qualitative analysis also. So my plan also to write some sort of question pattern which we can use to better understand why people want to use the service — or why not? Is it related to concept side problems or maybe the technical implementation didn’t work for this user. And hopefully we have a better service this way also. The dialogue is a key element of a good service.

But on work side, I have nothing more to say for now — I’ll just relax a bit before getting back to the office 28.7. Hopefully I’ll be able to share a bit more then. But, in the meantime: if you have questions or ideas what you want to hear from me: use to comment box!