Nokia's latest smartphones may be chasing the ubiquity of iPhones and Androids, but the Finnish phone maker hopes that vivid colors, simple form factor and the "instinctive" user interface on its latest Lumia range will help claw back thinning margins and faltering profits. The trick is to appeal to trend-setters, much like Apple's iMacs first did nearly 15 year ago. Are its designers and managers living in a parallel universe, or can they pull it off?
Last year its chief executive told staff that they were "standing on burning platform," before announcing his Hail Mary pass, a partnership with Microsoft on mobile software. Nokia then released a range of four "Lumia" smartphones, marrying Microsoft's Windows 7 mobile operating system with Nokia's knack for industrial design. The Lumia 800 for instance boasts a single polycarbonate body with all sorts of carefully-considered features, from the camera button to the audio jack that designers demanded be placed on the far edge of the phone's base.
Nokia launched its first Lumia phone, the 800, in October 2011. Around four months later, on January 26, Nokia said it had sold "well over 1 million Lumia devices." The company has not broken down sales of the Lumia 800 or three others in the range, the 610, 710 and the new, larger, 900. But industry establishment seems to like them: the Lumia 800 and 900 have both received positive reviews and won design awards, including the International Design Excellence Award last week from IDSA.
But this hasn't been enough for the company as a whole. Last April, Samsung finally knocked Nokia off its 15-year reign as the world's most popular smartphone vendor. Then last month, Nokia said it was laying off 10,000 people, on top of the 14,000 job cuts it had announced in 2011. Its already-floundering share price tanked; the stock is down 70% in the last 12 months. Analysts are cutting their price targets, and expect continuing pain for Nokia's transition to Microsoft software. Nokia is trying to climb out of a hole.
Staff are putting on a brave face in all this, as is Nikki Barton (photo, above), the company's vice president of design for smartphone devices. "I'm extremely proud of what we're producing," said Barton from the vast confines of an all-white boardroom in Nokia's London design studio. "That's what drives me personally."
In an interview last Thursday, Barton explained how Nokia was designing its way out of that hole. She described how she had been spotting people across London using Lumia phones, from a woman in a restaurant who was showing a recently-acquired Lumia 800 to her fellow diners, to a female friend who, after playing with the same device at a bar, found herself approached by two different men all wanting to know more about her phone.
"Sightings" of the Lumia illustrate just how much Nokia's new phones still have to go to find mainstream acceptance. Once the world's dominant mobile phone vendor, Nokia's newest releases are struggling to fight the entrenched dominance of Apple's iPhone and the growing stable of cheaper Android smartphones from HTC, Samsung and China's ZTE.
Maybe -- just maybe -- Nokia can get somewhere if enough early adopters, like those Barton has sighted, give its smartphones a shot. "We've won a lot of awards, which is great," said Barton. "But when people get it in their hands they realize how powerful it is." This speaks to one reviewer's recent comment, that "There's a certain injustice [the Lumia 800] is not selling better."
Barton insisted there was much to love in the product design: the "incredibly effective" colors that users can coordinate on the Lumia home screens with the device's main colour. Nokia is among the few phone makers out there to have brought out a vivid range of devices with a single-color polycarbonate body, meaning scratching the phone leads to blue or pink all the way through. "These phones are really difficult to make," a Nokia spokesperson said. "There's only one vendor that can make a pure cyan." She refused to say who.
Barton also talked up Nokia apps like "Mix Radio" and "Journey Planner," which she used for planning her own cycle commute. Nokia's app presence is improving: Apple's store boasts 650,000 apps and Android's 470,000, while the Windows App store has swelled from 7,000 apps in January 2011, to 100,000 apps today, narrowing the gap with competitors.
There seems to be a strange paradox in the way Nokia designs its phones, though. On the one hand it invests a great deal in finding out what end-users want, buying consumer-insights research or sending its staff to live with families around the world on what Barton calls "immersions." On the other, the phones' more expensive features have questionable usefulness: the colorful polycarbonate casing, or the whopping 41-megapixel camera in Nokia's new Pure View phone.
For all the listening Nokia does to consumers, it is also dictating the direction of its product design. Perhaps that's Nokia's attempt to create a brand culture, as Apple has done so successfully for more than a decade, and since it introduced the brightly-coloured iMac in 1998. Barton, who helped design Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac, said that a new breed of consumers using the Lumia range was emerging. "Nokia traditionally has had a culture built around simplicity of use, clarity," she said. "It's also had a color story. In the last few months I've seen that culture starting to grow around the Lumia and Windows Phone."
Barton did not go on to describe this culture in much detail, but she did refer to the "heads-up" philosophy that Nokia's head designer, Marko Ahtisaari, is trying to kickstart with the Lumia range. The idea is that from taking a photo, to turning on the device, to making a phone call, there should be as little visual interaction with the phone as possible; using it should be almost instinctive.
"Marko talks about how we're at the beginning of interaction design and mobile design," Barton added. "He compares it to when cars had a tiller instead of a steering wheel. If you think of how fast the mobile industry has evolved in the last 20 years, from nothing to now, it's still early on in the development." This is why Nokia still sees potential to become popular again, to be the comeback kid -- the mobile industry is still early enough in its growth that there's room to change people's perceptions about what makes a good, desirable phone.
"We've been extremely brave in bringing this device out," Barton added, before picking up a Lumia 800 model and gesturing with it. She spoke frequently about how much she and others in the company admired its form factor and enjoyed the simple pleasure of holding it. "It's easy to add bells and whistles." Instead, future iterations of Lumia phones will see it further "refined," and simplified as much as possible, and go further with the instinctive-use credo, Barton explained.
Barton then brought out a pink, bluetooth device that she used to answer her Nokia phone while on the go (pictured on page 1). Bluetooth technology is nothing new, but the pink ear piece is part of the Nokia colorful product stable, and the heads-up behavior it is trying to encourage. "I just pop it out and put it in my ear," she said. "Those changes in behaviour are really important."
Given the accolades that Nokia had received for its product design, did Barton wish the Nokia's marketing strategy was a bit better? She answered, perhaps a little too on-message that "there's some amazing social media marketing strategy" coming from Nokia. (Nokia recently announced it had a new Chief Marketing Officer, Finnish executive Tuula Rytila, replacing American Jerri DeVard.)
Nokia's designers must contend with other limitations too: Microsoft recently announced that Windows Phone 7 handsets won't get an upgrade to Windows Phone 8, which will limit anyone that's already bought a Lumia 900.
For now, Nokia has to hope that the vivid colors, simplicity and its heads-up philosophy will create a brand culture appealing enough for more customers to want to jump on board. Its phones still don't have the same magnetic draw of Apple's products, and perhaps that's because it's still hard to see what Nokia wants to say about itself. With those "immersions," the surveys, the historic ubiquity of its phones and wide ranging product portfolio, Nokia has tried to be everything for everyone, following its tagline of "Connecting people." Now it is creating products that people can aspire to. The challenge is in marketing, and creating phones that offer unique features against the iPhone and Android devices -- that probably means more than just vivid colors and a simple form factor.
This challenge does not seem to bother Barton too much. "The Lumia's design is just such a game changer," the designer added, her enthusiasm showing no signs of waning. "It's the beginning of something big."
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