By Karin Bendixen

Co-operation with Competing Businesses is a must

When they have to develop functional, usable new products and technologies, major telecom companies cannot run their own race: they have to co-operate with the competition, primarily in the users’ interest, but also for financial and operational reasons. Communication devices are all set to be the world’s largest consumer product segment. And research has so far practically only scratched the surface of user interface design for mobile communications and information devices.

That is how Bruno von Niman, from Sweden’s major telecom manufacturer Ericsson, puts it. His experience includes collaborating with his competitors’ human factors personnel. Trained in man-machine interaction, including computer sciences and psychology, von Niman specialises in Human Factors and Usability.

A shared, open technical interface that is now being tipped as the soultion for deploying Assistive Technologies, the Bluetooth headset is an example that demonstrates that companies do not just run their own race when developing new products.

Listen to the Users

When Crisp & Clear starts interviewing von Niman, he has just finished a focus group interview:

"The development of future technologies cannot continue without even more user involvement and digging down to identify core user needs. If you want to predict the future: responding to consumer reactions won’t be enough."

Bruno von Niman invites users with or without any specific product in mind: the idea is to listen and learn. Listen to problems, learn how users live, how they spend their day, and not least what they expect from the future and their tools. The focus group interview is taken down in summary form.

As a global company in a global market, Ericsson has to service users all over the world, including both the young and the elderly. Depending on the product, they define the user profile. But they also need to know the environment in which the product will be used in and what it will be used for.

Besides young and elderly people, do you involve people with disabilities?

I prefer not to address any specific user group. Instead, we always do our best to consider the needs of the entire target group. A look at the ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute)definition of usability (see Fig. 1) immediately tells you how important it is to provide good user experience,” says von Niman.

Nevertheless, the special needs of e.g. blind people have been considered in the product development process in the telecommunications industry.

No thanks!

A number of telecommunications companies have tried to design products specially for elderly people, featuring larger keys etc. The response has been ‘No thanks’.
According to von Niman, there is evidence that most elderly people do not want products designed especially, ‘only’ for them. They want to be able use the same fancy, new devices as everybody else. Therefore, Design for All seems to be a more relevant approach.

"Although we do, of course, integrate as much as possible in our products to accommodate the highest possible number of users, you have to understand that if a mobile phone is to be used by a workman on a building site, it must be capable of resisting blows, water and dust, have keys you can use while wearing gloves, a perceptible ring indication and so on," says von Niman.

Some of Ericsson's models are designed to cater for special requirements: e.g. to resist blows, water and dust - and must be operable while wearing gloves.

Industrial Reality

Asked whether he thinks that economy and design are ultimately given priority over usability, Bruno von Niman says no.

"This is fundamentally a question of an industrial reality. To put it very simply, what is good for the users is good for the manufacturer. From beginning to end, it is a matter of co-operation. I participate in discussions of the pre-concept, and there is always a good dialogue. There have been examples of the form preceding the contents, but I think we are moving in the right direction," says von Niman.

"Damn good Reasons"

According to Bruno von Niman, Design for All should not be a matter of legislation, except in some areas of public safety and security. But he believes that constructing standards for open interfaces to be the proper basis for future products. As a consequence, Ericsson also participates in the ETSI, where von Niman is Vice-Chairman of the Human Factors group.

"It has always been important to agree on standards: it is best for business and best for the users, as well as making sound economic sense because you don’t have to start from scratch every time, every time you tackle a new market. We base our work on the ISO as well as ETSI’s definition of Usability. You have to have damn good reasons not to comply with the standards: they have made a lot of things much easier. Just take the SMS: you can fly between countries or continents and still send an SMS message, in your own language, in the same way."

Bruno von Niman would like to see more technology users, such as operators, users and consumers’ organisations, getting involved in ETSI’s work, contributing with their needs and visions to the future directions of development.

Industrial Consensus

Von Niman sees no risks in working closely with competitor companies in the Human Factors area, on the basic, generic level. Some recent examples of this are BlueTooth, Symbian (operating systems for mobile devices), WAP (wireless internet), SyncML (data and content synchronisation) and MeT (mobile electronic commerce).

"Defining the common user interface and interaction elements on most the basic level would be a way to fulfil an e-society for all of tomorrow, as users would be able to recognise themselves between different technologies and brands, re-using knowledge. For example, a simple speech recognition application command for editing, ‘Save’, should be enabled to work with the same command for a mobile phone using the same technology, as well, or a PC dictation software."

"Such activities for identifying generic user interface principles, setting up the harmonised minimum requirements, are ongoing and several new are planned for. They will be performed by manufacturers in collaboration, looking for industrial consensus, under the umbrella of ETSI HF, with the anticipated support of European Commission."

Published in Crisp & Clear No. 3, October 2000