Video: What is life-enhancing? The balance between technology and user experience. Nokia’s Jo Harlow and Monster’s Noel Lee

Here’s an interesting video covering a topic that’s coming up frequently in the discussions here.  The video is titled,

“What is life-enhancing? The balance between technology and user experience”

Here they talk about focusing now on user experience instead of just pure technology. Nokia has led in Technology before like no other, but along came Jobs and his user experience. Despite what future technologies our Nseries had, it was no match for the simplicity of use that brought smartphones to a whole new level of users. Joe averages that didn’t have to be that extra bit technical to work a phone. It was all to promote simplicity, ease of use, reliability, fluidity of usage. In essence, as Nokia said with the N8 (though never quite got on Symbian^3) It’s NOT technology, it’s what you do with it. It’s not about having feature X, Y, Z, it’s about having features that users/consumers will connect to and as such find it easy and natural to use. This means no menu digging, just simple, here it is. Done. Nokia’s achieved this brilliantly with MeeGo-Harmattan (not used it long enough to say but it was sure pleasant) and now Nokia’s focused on bringing ‘user-experience’ first on Windows Phone.

Right, ok to the actual video. Had a little rant there. The video is with Nokia’s Jo Harlow, EVP Smart Devices and Noel Lee, Founder of Monster – Nokia’s new partner for the Purity line of audio accessories. Jo talks about how consumers now are bombarded with specs. As far as the public is concerned, the simplest way to understand things is the bigger the number, the better? (Processors, megapixels, GB storage etc etc) though obviously to you and I, that’s not always the case. Noel talks about liking Stephen Elop’s presentation. There are many phones that do social media, but none quite as integrated, as cohesive, as simplified, effectively as fun as that people hub. That’s the kind of the not-necessarily-inventing-but-polishing-and-simplifying job that Apple is often known for.

I’d love to carry on and talk you through the rest of the video but I’ve got some revision for tomorrow that I have to finish up. Maybe I’ll come back to this video again if there’s anything worth talking up again.

Video by NokiaConversations

Category: Nokia, Rant