Mint Usability

I stumbled upon this video review of all new mobile touchscreen UI; Smart Touch, by GSmart. Well, ok. It’s just a rework of Windows Mobile “home screen”.

Couple of things what hit me. First of all, the dreadful Windows Mobile basis that lies underneath, and the fact that little, polished, things have huge effect on user experience.

Let’s start from the Windows Mobile. Why in nine hells does it have to have such a small icons if it’s supposed to be used with touchscreen? Well, yeah, it might have been concieved in the dark times when PDA’s were the thing, and accurate stylus was giving the finger for… the finger, but why haven’t it evolved? It still boasts the miniscule X on the top-right corner and tiny icons next to that. So far I have seen only one proper finger based touchscreen phone, that being of course the iPhone. The rumors tell that the next model from our Nokia will have stylus and Sony-Ericson’s EXPERIA X1 will be using Windows Mobile under the hood. Gloomy times. Maybe I eventually have to cave in and buy myself an fruit phone.

Next, let’s move to user experience and the Smart Touch. Take the clock for example, simple and rather meaningless thing and yet it seems to have huge effect on his/hers (can’t actually check this out as the video doesn’t seem to work right now and I can’t recall the voice from the video, sorry) user experience. Same thing with customizable shorcut menu, even though it’s usability is rather horrendous, it still looks and feels like polished product hence it adds in to the common pool we’d like to call user experience. If it’s not well proven fact, then it probably should be, that well polished products make happy customers, in the short run anyways. The devil is in the details, it seems, though I would like to believe that the need for real usability would kick in when the honeymoon is over.

Bonus round.
The voice in the video mentions that (can’t actually check the exact words either) one “you can see missed calls easily” and then proceeds to tell how, “by tapping this tiny icon“. Wait, what? Touchscreen, big-ass finger and tiny icon is good?

It goes only to prove one of my main points that subjective opinion is hardly an measurement of usability, you need either expert evauation or preferrably usability testing.

I can almost see Apple enthusiasts rallying up with their pitchforks and torches, but let’s just continue bit further into this, before going all witch-hunt on me.

Well, ok. Multi-touch as a concept isn’t completely useless, I give you that. The simple idea of using multiple input points has so much potential but everyone has been just blindly following Jeff Han, whos initial concept was just that, a concept, not a polished product. The idea has depreciated so much that today, even though there are practically no products around, multi-touch is useless, just a buzzword to sell a product and nothing to do with usability. So far, I haven’t seen single useful commercial end user solution. Why has no-one stopped to rethink the whole idea?

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