Motorola Inc. is in the process of rolling out a new user interface the company hopes will take it into the multimedia age.
“We’re not building a phone; we’re building a mobile communications device,” said Doug Walston, director of Motorola’s UI design team.
As such, Walston said, an interface needs to reflect the fact that today’s mobile phones can do far more than place and receive calls. A “mobile communications device” can send e-mail, play music, take pictures and surf the Internet as well as place and receive calls-and a modern interface needs to provide access to such features in a simple, straightforward way.
Motorola, however, is not known for simple, straightforward user interfaces. Critics have long bemoaned the UI on Motorola phones as complicated and overly techy. Indeed, Walston admits that Motorola’s longtime UI-called Synergy within the company-wasn’t designed with multimedia in mind.
“The actual UI … was getting fairly complex,” he said.
Motorola first introduced Synergy in the late 1990s. It initially was intended for the simplest of phones-those with black-and-white screens that could display three lines of text at a time. As the years passed and phones advanced, Motorola designers simply added new features and functions to Synergy. For example, the company added a new icon and menu list to support picture-messaging services on camera phones.
“We turned a Volkswagen Beetle into an RV over time,” Walston said, explaining that the UI grew more bulky as the company added new technologies. “We needed a more flexible operating system.”
Work on the company’s new user interface began several years ago, in conjunction with Motorola’s plans to transition to a Java/Linux-based software platform for its mobile phones. Walston and his team laid out more than 600 tasks that the UI would have to perform, everything from dialing a number to playing an MP3 music file to composing a text message. The goal was to make sure the UI would intuitively guide a user through each of those 600 tasks.
Walston said Motorola relied on several key guidelines in building its new user interface. First, the company would rely on “de-facto standards” within the mobile-phone industry. Such standards-like right and left soft keys, a joystick or circular directional pad, and “send” and “end” buttons-are on most mobile phones, and phone users have come to expect the layout.
Second, Walston outlined several “golden paths” through the UI. The paths would lead users through the most common tasks, such as placing calls or adding new phone numbers to address books. To travel a golden path, a user would be able to press the same button to quickly move through the choices. For example, a user would press the right soft key to add a new phone number and would continue to use the right soft key to complete the task.
Finally, Walston divided the UI between communication functions and media functions. Communication functions would cover calling, text messaging, picture messaging, e-mail and other means of interaction. Media would deal with getting and using video, pictures and music.
To help direct their efforts, Walston and his UI team relied on two main sources-end users and Motorola’s competitors. Walston said the team conducted dozens of what he called “usability tests” in various locations across the world. The tests usually involved between six and 12 regular people who Motorola rounded up to play with its UI. Walston and his team laid out several tasks for the users to complete-place a call or write and send a text message-and watched what the test group did. If a particular section of the UI gave users problems, Walston knew it still needed work.
“Obviously, we don’t make those decisions in a black hole,” he explained.
Walston also consulted products from Motorola’s competition. Indeed, Nokia Corp., LG Electronics Co. Ltd. and others pride themselves on the simplicity of their own user interfaces. The UI team played with various phones to see what worked and what didn’t.
The results produced Motorola’s new UI, which will ship in its Java/Linux phones starting later this year.
The new UI includes several key advances, Walston said. In the communications arena, the new UI simplifies messaging with what Walston calls a “universal composer.” In most current phones, users must first choose whether they want to compose text messages or picture messages and then decide what to include in the messages. Motorola’s UI does away with that choice, sending the message as a short message service or multimedia messaging service message depending on what it contains.
“We designed a way to take that tech choice away from the user,” Walston said. “We will just handle that switch.”
However, because MMS messages usually cost more to send than SMS messages, the UI alerts users of their choices before the messages go out.
The UI also includes speaker-independent voice-recognition technology developed within Motorola’s research labs. The technology allows users to say, “Call Doug,” to place a call, without having to first train the devices to recognize the sound of their voices.
Interestingly, Walston said Motorola left the UI’s normal calling functions largely untouched.
“We didn’t try to reinvent the wheel there,” he said.
Within the media section of the UI, Motorola introduced a new download manager. The manager allows users to continue to navigate the UI while the phone is working to download a file from the network. For example, if a user chooses to download a large MP3 file, they won’t be stuck looking at an hour glass icon during the download.
“We’ll always be looking to streamline and simplify those tasks,” Walston said.
Perhaps Motorola’s most interesting UI development is its Screen3 technology. The technology adds Internet information to a phone’s main screen and regularly updates that information. Thus, a user only has to look at his main screen to get the latest Chicago weather information.
“We help bring the Internet to the user,” Walston said.
Although work on Motorola’s new UI is largely complete, Walston’s labor continues. He said the company must continue to refine and evolve its UI as new features and services are introduced.
“We believe we should be designing new UIs constantly,” he said. “We’re already thinking about the next one.”
