I got excited when I received an email from Nokia announcing the new Nokia Music Store. OK, I didn’t get excited at all, Nokia has been sending me promises of good service for a long time. Without success.
I have been an unhappy Nokia E61 user for a year or so (they are still selling that model). The interface is horrible and the whole telephone is very slow. I managed to load music into my phone only once, I never did it again. OK, OK, Nokia is the number one phone maker but that might be because they are making a good business in the third world selling cheap phones.
The new Music Store
Designing with standards and for everybody should be something that customers and designers themselves should fight for. When I tried to see the new Nokia Music Store a beautiful "Unsupported Browser" message was displayed. GREAT. The only system combination that works with it is the Windows-Internet Explorer one.
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"Nokia Music does not currently support the Mozilla Firefox (Mac OS X) browser on your operating system"
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My point
This is not what customers want, specially here in Europe where Firefox has a 30% market share, in some EU countries with market share higher then 40% (as reported by Ars Technica in January 2008). In a perfect world we would design for standard browsers, but the world is not perfect. Making a service available for different browsers is something that it’s going to affect the usability of it.
We are not talking about a startup, we are talking a huge company. So why not spending some more money to make products available for all?
get a life
Thank you Oliver, from Nokia.
Thanks for the review, and actually if Nokia or other huge enterprises could spend a little more time designing for a broader user base this music service and other services with the same problem could make the user experience a lot better.
The apps need to be written in a way that a lot of people can use them, not just some people.
It’s true that IE and Windows are the biggest couple in the party, but as you noted not all the people use that mix, maybe Firefox and Windows, Linux and Firefox, OSX and Safari, etc, etc, etc…
It’s hard to write an app for all?? it’s hard, but it’s possible and actually can make you get more revenue than just writing for an specific platform.
This issue is not just for Nokia, but it’s an example.
Cheers!