You want to put an ironic smiley face at the end of your post, or was it that hobgoblin which prompted you to post it in the first place?

I read that as 'New Moon' first! I'd already checked that after the sudden outbreak of 'threads you can and can't post in about shipping' that night. I did notice that 2nd Nov is Full Moon here: so when I get an email from Amazon saying their date was wrong, and they only just noticed they're not shipping my n900, I'm gonna Hooowwwwlllll!!!

Well that happens,and I guess it isn't worth it to point out where and what, but IMO you posted as user not as council member. For in the latter case you can discuss such in private.

Do you honestly expect an engineer to admit his product is flawed right before its launched, while the product he worked on is receiving last minute fixes to fix important flaws which lead to product delay right now?

Lets be realistic and honest here: even if you are 100% right in your argument this isn't the right time and place for this discussion. OK, maybe if your target is 5.0.1 or 5.1 instead of 6.0.

Yes, it is very good 300+ people from all over the world received a device, and have provided feedback. Yes, flaws such as filesystem almost full should be fixed ASAP. But some criticism cannot be easily dealt with in a short-term time, and we cannot demand full ASR portrait mode, and tabs included in HIG, and MMS support, and and and [...] for what we discuss now is rather short-term hacks, and we know next focus is Qt and Maemo 6.

If your remarks are regarding Maemo 6 I did not say much if anything although this isn't quite clear to me from disscussion.

Did not meant to insult you...

How do you suggest we, as Maemo community, or Nokia as corporation selling N900 end-user product, improve usability?

I wanted to include that in my post but I don't see some kind of lab set up, and the biases blur the objectivity of the studies. I don't see a way to document the workflows of users remotely, with their consent and potential loss of privacy, while allowing this for an average user. Some debug logs might be worthwhile, but then you don't have the user's experience as non-expressed documented, nor their eye movement. Remotely, without consent and unbiased test environment, it is difficult to document worthwhile data!!

Fortunately it isn't. Otherwise we would have to wait for a final product until the year 2073 or so. Hot air does not build consumer products. Welcome to the real world
(this discussion is "slightly" drifting off-topic...)

Veeery diverse discussion. I guess that's good. I cannot touch on all the issues, but let me raise some up.

- Naturally I'm/we're not trying to say that there is no room for improvement. Things will improve, in Harmattan and in future. The original question was kind of phrased over what is right now available in the 1.0 Fremantle SW release, and I tried to answer that question, based on the realities at the same when that solution was designed. It's not "take it or leave it" for the future. Naturally the whole idea here is to be iterative, listen to customer feedback and react on it.

- On direct communication with customers. Well, there shielding designers is mostly a good thing. If we would do what everyone would ask of us to do, we would be going nowhere fast. We - as in Maemo, I cannot vouch one way or another for other parts of Nokia - have good processes in determining requirements for applications and features. I can come up with a thousand requests from thousand different persons on what more should be done. Having a process to manage these requests is a very good thing indeed.

- Yes, there would be good ways to provide filtering for the missed calls list. If it would be there, some people would use it. Don't worry, one day Maemo might be just as bloated as Symbian in terms of the amount of applications as well as the amount of features within each application. Symbian pays the price for having a great number of features. The more you build up, the bigger of a giant you turn up to be. It's an elephant, and elephants do not run as fast. Maemo hasn't yet been an elephant, or a nuclear bomb, it on some terms has tried to be more something like a cruise missile: agile and accurate strike, a one-size-fits-all rather than a all-sizes-for-all-targets solution.

- UI consistency. Naturally it has been a highly iterative process. The rulesets changed many times during the process. When new needs came up, they rulesets were altered. But no, I don't believe that the best process would be that each time one individual app. designer is not able to do something within a given ruleset, then the UI style or ruleset should be automatically adjusted. It's much harder to say no than to say yes in these scenarios, but only by saying no you can get some kind of consistency. Constraints in the UI style create consistency.

- +1 to benny1967's post.

- The end users are always right, in the same way as customers are always right. We have heavily invested in end user testing throughout the design process. Every app is tested, at the end of the day multiple times.

Forums like these are not end user testing. They are the opinions of a very vocal minority, in terms of the overall total user base. Please do not fool yourselves that there would be always an automatic link between the opinions of a vocal minority and the opinions of a mass silent majority. There is not. Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn't. That's an observation that comes after observing endless user tests (with the "real users") and comparing their results and comments to the opinions on forums like these.

This is not to say that the opinions here wouldn't be very important. They are, but more in the style of lead user data, tech. leader data, early adopter data. To simplify the whole topic a great extent, things become mass market after they are "extremely simple" (yet extensible and scalable) to expert needs.

- Yes, everything that you ask and every feature that we would have said yes to, things would have come out a bit later, and the device might cost more. Ask yourself the painful question of which is more important: getting the product out, or taking more time to do feature X. No, you cannot have both. Yes, I know it's painful. Yes, these were the questions that were asked here some year ago.

I've tried different angles at presenting my viewpoints on this but regardless I see from some responses that either I'm still misunderstood or some are so defensive on the overarching topic that they're going to continue spawning unnecessary tangents.

I just want to make some observations about the "wrapping", not the axle:

- I find it distressing to see straw men constructed every single time UI debates spring up. I really, really wish we could all remain reasonable and just flat avoid logical fallacies outright-- but this thread is so full of them it's painful to read. Guys, there's no reason to immediately leap to extreme interpretations of a poster's point(s). In fact that tends to be a passive-aggressive tactic to control the discussion, and it's extremely discouraging to see it in an environment oriented around openness.

- Certainly formal usability studies provide significant value... but so do points presented from a sheer common sense/experience perspective. It's grossly unfair to insist that people avoid presenting ideas in an informal setting, especially in the context of the Maemo devices. I for one sure don't want to be the person telling people here that they can't discuss potential problems or suggestions!

I have nothing further to add on the heated subject other than "brace yourself, Bugzilla!"

I'm only half way in this long thread and need to go now, but...

- As a user that lives online and gets just a few calls a day mostly from the same bunch of numbers I'm totally happy with the call history thing and the phone UI in general. Lost calls and major events in general: remember that there is a LED blink telling you about that as well.

- If the phone aspect is so much more important than the computer aspect for a user, then Nokia has a variety of devices to cover that.

- If you have a better plan for the phone UI please use http://maemo.org/community/brainstorm/ to submit your proposals. Consistent mockups and plenty of votes on your side will help.

The Maemo team is totally consciouss that this is the first phone relase of ours, and is listening to feedback willing to address major problems and great ideas.

Ok, here you go Quim:

http://tabulacrypticum.wordpress.com...he-nokia-n900/



(granted, slightly different topic, but....)

The problem seems to be that the phone aspect and computer aspect are both important.

It seems that with this device Nokia finally lives up to "This is what computers have become" slogan. But is this already "Convergence without compromises"? Seems not.

I think that much frustration arises from the fact that there should not be a problem for N900 also to be an excellent phone. For example this call list thing: does it really mess up the whole UI design if the user is given a change to filter the messages by their type by for example adding small icons (for missed, called and answered calls) on top of the long list? These icons could be clicked and after that the call list would be sorted according to call type? Could even the icons separating the call types act as these "buttons"?

About the Brainstorm: maybe someone with a N900 could add a suggestion? I am certainly willing to help but because I do not have a N900 I do not know how the things really work in the actual device so it would be a bit difficult for me to write down an enhancement proposition...

And about the LED mentioned by qgil: I really hope I can turn it of. The blinking LED on my N73 almost caused me a divorce by keeping my wife awake at night (it illuminates the whole room in the dark!). Luckily I realized that it can also be turned off.

To be honest, I feel the problem in this thread is to get something sensible and useful out of it before you all have used the N900 for a week at least. Before that, how useful is to argue the decisions done by the Maemo team after months of study, planning, development and testing (yes, with real users as well).

I understand situations where someone raises up an approach done by some not-very-known product / concept / designer. It might be that our team has missed this, yes. But... the Symbian/S60 phone UI? Do you really believe that our UX team has just "missed" things that are "common sense" coming from there? Well, in the Maemo UX team you can also find former S60 designers in the first place.

So it's not only about just pushing blindly a UI spec. We have our reasons to interpret what makes sense for Maemo target users, try out things, bet on something and be consistent with our bet. No risk no fun.

Then mistakes can happen and they come together usually with clear customer complaints sustained by numbers, great alternatives popping up and putting your own "solution" in evidence and so on.

The Brainstorm is more useful for you reflecting the potential UI weaknesses of the phone features in Maemo 5 than a long Talk thread.

I'm doing exactly the same phone related tasks I was doing with powerful "phone first" devices like the N95, N82 or E71. The difference with the N900 8and the N810 btw) is that my laptop at home hasn't been opened in the past 3 weeks and is generally underused.

To me this is "convergence without compromises" as good as it can reasonably be in 2009.

"Excellent phone" means different things to different people. If the biggest problem is this call list thing then we probably have nailed down the problem quite well in this first release.

I work surrounded by people using the N900 as primary device in the last months. Most of them former S60 users exposed to those tabs. The first time I hear this complaint is in this thread (and I swear lack of criticism on details is not a problem in the maemo team). I actually liked the change when I saw it and I never have missed those tabs.

Thank you for summarizing why the Brainstorm is useful getting a better signal vs noise ratio. Filing a convincing Brainstorm proposal is more complex than questioning someone's work in a forum post relying on own assumptions and others posts, true.

Settings -> Notification light -> 7 checkboxes to enable/disable LED in different situations including "Missed call" (enabled by default).