6 steps to improve NOKIA S60 UI

Hello pundits,
today I continue the "UI improvement ideas" series and today our guest is.../drumroll/...
NOKIA S60 platform, as captured in it's N95-1 incarnation (f/w 11.0.026).
For the purpose of this review, I was using only default settings, and it's worth to note that some of my points could be alleviated by changing the defaults. But changing them could be even a tougher task.

Here's the brief: yes, the S60 is more complex than S40, and so it's less intuitive.
But it gives you whole lot'o'features!
Anything on Earth in mobile smartphone arena - you can have it.
The price? You must subdue to arcane logic of it's user interface.
Get used to it or get lost.

Here I will focus on how this UI makes you focus more on what you want, instead of trying to get out of your way.

Point 1. Bag of buttons. Think hard before you pick one.
I am not against buttons per se, just let me show you how confusing they can be.
The three most-used features of a phone are
a) call register,
b) contacts book and
c) SMS messages.

With S60, you have to think hard which button you press for doing those tasks, the phone buttons are all close to each other, and on the same left side by default.
It makes it difficult to pick the right button for the task, without a considerate and significant focus on what you're trying to accomplish. Thus, it all makes UI less intuitive and more cumbersome for everybody but the S60 fans or long-term users.

Ex. 1. Let's go to Contacts.
Unlock the phone. By default, the Contacts label is selected in the shortcuts strip near the top of the screen. Looking at the top of the screen and knowing (from many mobile phone UIs) that the right-side button [usually] Exits, and the left-side button [usually] Opens, I click the left button and... go to Calculator instead. That's because I was not attentive enough to look at the bottom of the screen. Of course, my fault. But what if I am in the street? Or in a car? For sure, I need my attention for other things. So how can I have my attention also in two places of the screen? Only by getting used to S60. But that's counter-intuitive.

Ex.2. Call register on-the-go.
Imagine you are walking the street or driving a car.
You remember you promised to call back, while you were busy in another conversiation.
You take the phone, unlock it, and looking at the screen, it's not easy to understand how to go to the call register. There's no icon for it. You have to remember to press the green call button.
So here we get to the next

Point 2. Which calls you want? [think harder]
The call register is split into 3 parts - Dialled numbers, Received calls, and Missed calls.
In your mind, you have the name of a person, not the type of call. So now one more time to think harder and remember your recent history of communication with that person.
Or else - flip through all three logs, one by one, looking for that person's name.
A much better call register would have all calls in one list, with appropriate call type icon beside each entry. But that would be so UIQ-like...
Oh wait! You still can do this UIQ-like trick in S60! But what it takes?
Go to Menu - Applications - Log. Click Right button.
You will see all call activities, including packet data, SMS, MMS and WLAN access.
Of course, you can set the shortcut to Log on either the standby labels or to one of the soft-button.
And I like that flexibility.
But how many users notice and actuallty do that, instead of routinely hacking through the default setup of the interface?

Point 3bis. "No files".
Put some music files onto phone. Take some pictures.
Now, imagine you have taken some really nice pictures, and a lot of them.
Close all applications. Start the Gallery - Images & Video.
Right after the application start, it shows "(no images or videos)" on screen!
That's when the heart breaks. The more pictures you have, the longer your face grows while you try to understand where the stuff went. That's because the application scans the memory for files. If the progress takes some time, a progress bar says "Opening" but this is understood as "opening the application", not as "yet scanning for your files".
And you could still see the scary message in background.
Why not put another message, say, "(scanning)"? The same behaviour goes on in the Music player while it scans for tracks.


Point 4. Not every program born equal. [So dig around before you find the right place, or use your memory]
Let's install some 3rd party programs into the phone.
Let's count now how many clicks you need to get to one of them (phone unlocked).
Click1 - the Menu button. Two more "Up" clicks to select Application item.
Centre click to Open. Now you have the Nokia apps at the top, so you have to scroll.
OK, the fastest way to scroll is Up. And the final click to Open the app.
Total=6 clicks as bare minimum for a 3rd party app with no pre-set shortcut.

Here's the same feat in UIQ2.1 - (flip open).
Scroll by using the jog-dial until you select the app. Click the jog-dial inside.

Here's the same feat in iPhone (unlocked).
Press the icon of the app.

Point 5. Locked away from a user.
Imagine you use your phone at your work desk.
You leave it on the table, so there's no need to lock the keypad.
But also, there's no way for the phone to know that.
Now, you put in a charger cable in.
This is one way for the phone to know that a keypad lock is not needed.
USB connection is another way.
The lock is needed only when the phone is being carried, right? It was designed to prevent accidental dials and keypresses when on-the-go.
Now, there are 2 cables in the phone (it is hardly being on-the-go) and it still locks the keypad!
No way I need that behaviour.

Ex.1. Four clicks to see new SMS or use USB cable.
Every time I get an SMS I need to do 4 button clicks instead of just one!
2 clicks to Unlock, one more to make the unlock message go away (which is another botherance, since I prefer to get a message only when there's something that needs my aditional attention), and one final click to show me the SMS. Quite annoying.
The same "locked nature" of S60 show itself when you want to use USB cable to sync it, or transfer music, or print images, or use it as a flash disk.
You connect a USB cable and the phone recognizes it, and asks you to choose one of four options - PC Suite, Mass storage, Image print or Media transfer.
But the phone does not unlock itself!
Quite contradictory behaviour.

Point 6. Kid's e-mail.
This one is pretty simple. The e-mail client does not support HTML.
Not to say of animated GIFs inline and such.
EDIT: You may still see the Attachment.html in the Web browser, though, but it requires 3 extra clicks per message.
So I'm adding Point 6bis for a balance-
There's no visual clue to how much progress the battery charging process made.
It could be 4 minutes left to full charge or 44 minutes - there's no way to tell.

This concludes my short review of NOKIA's newest mobile phone user interface, commonly known as S60 v3 FP1.

Watch this space for our next "guest"... from SonyEricsson!