Full article: COFFEE WITH SCOTT WEISS

November 2009, Amsterdam – London

Scott Weiss, welcoming you, me and everyone to get involved in the design of the next big thing in user experience.

Marijn Driessen, from Design for Conversion, sips coffee with Scott Weiss, User Interface Technology Manager of the Symbian Foundation and chair of the UI Council. She meets a technology expert who is passionate about his new mission and speaks a language she can understand. Remarkably!

When marketing meets hard-core technology, the former tends to shy away. Faced with the prospect of being inundated with technical jargon, coding talk, platform logistics, infrastructure bits and bobs, it can be tough to have a conversation on a level playing field.

Needless to say, I was a little apprehensive when asked to interview Scott Weiss, User Interface Technology Manager of the Symbian Foundation and Chair of the UI Council. So I decided to research Scott Weiss just that little bit extra in preparation for our coffee break. Turns out the engineer with a degree from Stanford University, is a communicator par excellence. I couldn’t have wished for a clear or more succinct responses.

Design for Conversion is proud to welcome Scott Weiss as keynote speaker of this year’s first Mobile Edition. As usual, practitioners of online marketing, user experience design and analytics will get their hands dirty to solve tomorrow’s, in this case, mobile conversion challenges.

Introducing the Symbian Foundation

Scott’s job didn’t exist until recently.  A highly acclaimed user experience expert with some 15 years of experience, Scott jumped at the opportunity to reach potentially 100’s of millions of people to improve their mobile user experience. The Symbian Foundation also offers him the chance to work in the world of open source. That plus being able to continue to work in Central London persuaded him to leave his significant position as Executive Director of the London Human Factors International office and take on the challenge of open source user experience development.

The Symbian Foundation is a new venture, which uses the existing assets of the Symbian platform with the objective to facilitate the community of designers to create a more flexible interface. Enabling a differentiation of user experiences and thereby pushing the Symbian platform forward.

DfC: How will the Symbian Foundation be the answer to more diversity in user experience on the Symbian platform?

SW: “The key to the success of improving user experiences through open-source is getting the involvement and collaboration from the community. And this is exactly where the fit lies with your approach during the Design for Conversion event. The challenge in engaging the community lies in our ability to convert people from observers to participants.”

DfC: What will you do to stimulate participation?

SW: “There is a number of ways in which we facilitate people to contribute to improvements in user experience.

Online visual brainstorms

First, we have created a platform for visual brainstorming through the blog, Symbian UI brainstorm. We welcome suggestions from all over the world of how to improve the user interface, but they have to be in the form of a small graphic. Take something you don’t like and fix it visually! No comments, no voting, no judgements – and it’s completely anonymous. So far we’ve had more than 30.000 visitors since the launch in June and more than 60 different ideas up on the site.

Online discussion boards

We also encourage people who don’t have the ability to submit a visual design to actively criticise and suggest ideas about the platform in discussion threads on the developer.symbian.org website.

Collaborative workshop between foundation members and the public

Third, I conduct UI workshops. So far we’ve done two and we will continue to do them quarterly where members of the public as well as Symbian Foundation members are invited to attend and bring their ideas.

Voting on ideas

Another vehicle for participation is www.ideas.symbian.org. This is a site where someone can make a suggestion and it does involve discussion and voting.

Symbian Expo

Finally, there is the Symbian Expo. Here we organise bird-of-a-feather meetings where we sit together and just come up with ways to make the platform better.”

DfC: With all that participation you do create some expectations. How do get those ideas to the next level of realisation? What is the decision chain?

SW: “The ideas inspire potential contributors (e.g. Nokia) to take them up and make them real. The Single Tap Enhancement is a direct result of the open-source spirit of the Symbian Foundation (ed. the single tap combines the acts to select and to open). This UI improvement was proposed by Ixios, a non-member company, and picked up by Nokia for realisation.

The process involves voting on the idea side, where the entire community gets involved. This is followed by a vote from the Symbian Council to decide whether or not to take it forward.”

DfC: In this open-source space, how do you facilitate the collaboration between the three disciplines that participate at DfC (online marketing, UX design and analytics)?

SW: “The three are quite important to the Symbian Foundation and myself. The community is primarily made up of designers, but we are also getting developers to contribute. As for marketers, if our platform isn’t delightful and seductive and convincing to the consumer no one is going to want the phones that run it. So we’re working with them, to reach out to their user base to help develop a seductive experience. “

DfC: In an earlier discussion with DfC speaker, Jérôme Nadel from Sagem Wireless, spoke about the Puma Phone that will be launched during the World Cup. Can I ask you in conclusion, how can the Symbian Foundation be of use to lifestyle brands, such as Puma, who want to engage with their consumers through mobile lifestyle gadgets?

SW: “The Symbian Foundation offers those brands the opportunity to come up with creative initiatives. Let’s say Puma wanted to do something that wasn’t possible on another operating system. The fact that we’re open source means that anyone can submit changes that benefit their customers. In the case of Puma, for instance, track footsteps or heartbeat, link how many steps were taken on a particular day, connected to appointments, so that people could log their hikes, to take video of what they’ve done using their phone and upload this to their blog or to the Puma site to share with other members of the Puma community.

If it can’t be done on the Symbian platform any member of the public can propose changes to make those things happen. “

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Design for Conversion, The Mobile Edition is held on December 11^th in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.  The early bird offer is closing this week.