S60-powered smartphones get new features added with every new release. Features such as Audio Themes, photo geotagging, a touch-sensitive ‘Naviwheel’, and countless others. For power users who spend hours with a new phone checking out every nook and cranny in the operating system, this is great. We love discovering new things, and discovering new, so-called ‘easter egg’ features of our phones is part of what keeps them exciting, right?
Yes and no. I was reading this post at 25hoursaday.com, where the author is specifically talking about features on Reddit.com. Despite being a seasoned user, this guy ‘found’ several features that he never knew existed. As he accurately reasoned, if a new feature is too well hidden, the user will never find it, and therefore, it might as well not even be implemented in the first place. As I was reading, I began to think of the dizzying number of features added to S60 over the past few years, and how well some of them stand out, and which are missed entirely by most users.
The number one example, of course, is the S60 Task Manager. Before S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2, there was no way a user could ‘discover’ this feature, unless they had a habit of holding buttons for extended periods of time. What’s silly about that is that multitasking is one of the things that S60 actually excels at, and one of those features that sets it apart for most other phone platforms, even other smartphones. With Feature Pack 2, S60 finally got the ‘Show Open Apps’ menu item, introducing many users to the task manager for the first time ever.
As mentioned before, other things such as geotagging, Audio Themes, and the naviwheel come to mind immediately. Geotagging is off by default (thanks to privacy advocates), and is well-hidden in the camera settings menu, with a somewhat vague description (‘Record location’). The Audio Themes are something I’ve gone off about before – such a great feature, so well hidden by Nokia, both on the phone and on their website. The naviwheel is also off by default on most phones, and is hidden in the Settings menu on my Nokia N79.
Keypad shortcuts are another major offender of this rule. Newer applications from Nokia, such as Friendview, have a handy ‘keypad shortcuts’ menu option that lists out the various shortcuts. Aside from that, most users never know. I’ve been an S60 user for years now, and while I know the S60 browser has a number of keypad shortcuts, the only ones I know is that 8 gives me the mini-map and 5 switches tabs. Aside from that, I haven’t a clue what the other keys do.
I’m certainly not advocating against so-called easter eggs in phones or applications. However, I’m wondering if this Dare guy has a point, that features unknown to users might as well not even be there in the first place. Or, more realistically, if more thought should be put into how a user might ‘discover’ a given feature. What do you think? Are there some features that normal users wouldn’t ever find? How important do you think it is for these features to be easily discovered by users?
