Symbian,
Windows Mobile and
Android present mobile phone makers with a dilemma: if you make a phone based on one of these third-party operating systems, do you stick to the user interface that is integrated with it or do you put in your own customized UI? By sticking to the third-party UI you can offer people a familiar user interface, that is usually decent enough (but not necessarily more than that) in terms of usability. Even though Windows Mobile (recently rebranded as Windows Phone) can hardly be described as having a thoroughly loyal fan-base, for
HTC, a hardware supplier turned mobile phone brand, it was a blessing: HTC knew how to make hardware, but developing a good operating system and user interface can take years. By equipping their products with Windows Mobile they could bypass that hurdle.
However, if you really want to stand out from the crowd and have a user interface that goes beyond decent, into the realm of excellence, you may want to resume control of the UI. That way you can, for example, align the on-screen UI with the design of the physical controls, and solve issues you find suboptimal. However, usually, when companies start tinkering with a third-party UI, you get a mere skin or a different home screen on top of the actual user interface, as for example the
panels in
SonyEricsson's Xperia, or
Touch Flo in HTC's
Touch that was described as '
innovative and cool, but also flawed' by CNET.
Wired recently reviewed Samsung's Behold II, which turns out to be a poster boy for how not to customize a third-party UI, in this case the Android operating system.
Instead of sticking with an Android-only user interface, Samsung opted to mix things up with its own "TouchWiz" system. <...> However, Samsung's approach turned the Behold II's navigation into a nightmare. The end result is a disjointed experience, where sometimes you're using Android's menu system, and other times you're using TouchWiz — complete with different looking icons and menu trees.
Additionally, in their quest to build an innovative user interface Samsung's user interface designers seem to have forgotten the adage '
cool is not a good adjective for user interfaces'. Front and center in the Behold II's home screen is a rotatable onscreen cube, the six sides of which give you access to apps like YouTube and the music player.
The crown jewel of this split-personality experience is the multimedia-enhanced widget called the "cube." <...> Not only is the act of rotating the cube strangely challenging, it's mostly pointless. Using the regular menus to launch these tasks is easier, and the ability to store shortcut icons on the home screen negates its necessity. And don't even get us started on the "shake for a random app" feature.
I think that if you choose to base your product on a third party operating system you either completely surrender yourself to the built-in UI, because that provides a coherent, familiar experience, or you thoroughly rework the thing, but that should go (way) beyond letting the graphic and interaction designers to their thing. That it's possible to rework
and improve a third-party UI was shown by HTC with the Hero, which was equipped with the Sense UI, a customized version of Android, that
Wired called '
attractive, fairly logical and flashy.' Meanwhile, Samsung goes for a third option: it announced it will cease to build phones on the Symbian platform, but will
develop its own open OS platform, called
Bada. Perhaps they too were disappointed by the Behold II.
[Photo:
Wired]
