Nokia responds to our criticism of its Messaging software: An interview with Davis Fields
By The Prodigal Fool, published on 22 February 2010
We’ve been rather critical of Nokia recently. First we dismissed the N97 mini as an also-ran in the premium, touch-screen race; then we wrote a rather curt letter to OPK, Nokia’s CEO; and finally we concluded that the E72 just didn’t live up to the high standards set by its predecessor: the E71. In each case, there was a recurring complaint: we think Nokia’s messaging software is a mess. Awkward to set-up, ugly to look at, difficult to use, and unreliable: in our view Nokia Messaging is a long way from where it needs to be for Espoo to compete at the high-end of the smartphone market.
To its immense credit though, the one thing we can’t fault Nokia for is its willingness to engage with the community and to tackle criticism head-on. The Nokia Messaging team in particular has always been forthcoming and pro-active when it comes to communicating with its users. Today they’re at it again as Davis Fields, one of the product managers at Nokia Messaging sits down with The Guide to submit himself to our questions…
Davis, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. After the strong criticism we’ve levied recently at Nokia Messaging, we’re absolutely delighted to get the chance to chat with you. First, tell us a little bit about your current role at Nokia. What are your responsibilities?
I am a product manager inside of Nokia’s Consumer Messaging group – I’ve worked on a number of different products within the group since I started here. The parts relevant to our discussion are the user-facing content – I owned the creation of our site, I’m the person who posts on the @nokiamessaging twitter handle and I appear in the Nokia BetaLabs videos whenever we do new releases.
We have a wonderful team spread across the world. I’ve been at Nokia since 2008, and I am the community feedback liason for all the product managers we have currently working on Consumer Messaging.
Can you describe a typical day at the office?
It’s a cliché, but there is no typical day at the office. I am fortunate to be able to travel to visit various Nokia offices both domestically and over in Finland, so I’m often away. It’s truly a global company – plenty of conference calls and email chains with a veritable United Nations of office locations. When I’m at my home office in Boston, Massachusetts, I’ll take my morning calls and make my way in around nine, enjoy lunch in the cafeteria with my other colleagues and stay indoors five months of the year while the weather’s brutal outside.
We recently tried to set-up Nokia Messaging on a new device. It refused to connect and kept returning an error. In the end we visited your website to sign-in from there. It refused to accept our password. When we tried to reset our password, we got lost in an interminable cycle of inaccurate error messages (it told us we were sing an incorrect password; we knew we weren’t). In the end – through email support – someone from your team told us that the errors had been caused by trying to set-up Nokia Messaging on one device after another (surely not an unusual scenario?). They had to manually delete our accounts for us. On the one hand, full marks for customer service but on the other. Wait, this is supposed to be an interview not a rant. We should probably ask you a question then: surely your team can’t be providing this support to everyone? Two years after launch, why is the registration process still so full of bugs?
We are very proactive in our approach to engaging with our users on the Internet, for example you and I having this interview. We want our users to use the normal support channels – going to a Nokia Care Center, calling Nokia Care, their operator, etc – but, if you’re following us on Twitter and we can help you in 140 characters or less, we’re going to do it.
As a matter of fact, we just changed some significant things around password handling as a result of feedback like yours. Starting with the release which went out February 17th, Nokia Messaging now always aligns the Nokia Messaging password with the Email Service Provider (ESP) password. Users can now simply enter either their Nokia Messaging password or their current ESP password during authentication. The Nokia Messaging website at email.nokia.com no longer contains a “forgot password” function. If the password authentication succeeds and their Nokia Messaging password is different from the ESP password, the account will be updated and the current ESP password will become the Nokia Messaging account password. This will fix problems like the one you had and require no intervention from support.
To your main question – as announced at CES we have over 2 million Nokia Messaging for Email users and today we have over 6 million accounts created for Ovi Mail. This service launched as a beta in August 2008 and has come a long way since then. One of the key tenets when we designed Nokia Messaging was that it should be easy to setup, so we pay a lot of attention to our successful signup rate, which has been steadily increasing to a very high success rate today. And remember, we support on-device, simple sign-on for literally tens of thousands of ISPs throughout the world. When a user does have problems, there are plenty of support channels available, and we learn and act on the calls coming in to correct the problem so that it doesn’t happen for the next user.
Why has it taken this long to implement support for Destinations (a way to have Nokia Messaging automatically use Wi-Fi networks when available and to revert to cellular networks otherwise)?
Remember that Nokia Messaging is designed to be sold by an operator together with unlimited access to email and IM through the data plan. This allows customers to have unlimited access to their email over the cellular network without worrying about sticker shock when they get their monthly bill. So with that in mind, there were other enhancements to Nokia Messaging that took priority, such as IMAP subfolders, HTML email, and improving reliability and setup. We thought the time was right to add Destinations to Nokia Messaging, giving consumers more flexibility over their connectivity options. The ability to connect via WiFi was always there in the client if the user wanted it, but now we support the automatic switching if a user has WiFi available.
Have you used an iPhone? Do you use it as a benchmark when designing your software? When is Nokia Messaging going to be as easy to use and as good-looking as Apple’s Mail software?
I’ve used many competitor’s devices, including the iPhone. Nokia Messaging currently works on over 40 different devices in 198 different countries. I would be more than happy to demonstrate the Nokia Messaging client on an N97 next to the iPhone’s mail client. I would also love to demonstrate Nokia Messaging on slider, flip, touch, qwerty and keypad phones, across S40, Symbian and Maemo devices that are available in markets all over the world.
We’ve got some really nice betas coming out in the near future that are great both functionally and in visual appearance.
We’ve got plenty of improvements in the works for Nokia Messaging, and I am proud of how far we’ve come. Our design center embraces the challenge of creating clients for phones that go out all over the world in every shape, size and form.
We’d like to ask you about HTML or ‘the way email should look’ to the non-geeks amongst us. Why doesn’t Nokia Messaging emulate the iPhone and open mail by default in HTML?
On many Nokia Messaging phones, view as HTML is the default setting. On the phones that don’t open emails as HTML by default, the user can open the message in HTML and view it inside the web browser.
Data usage is obviously a big concern in the mobile industry today and HTML emails tend to consume a lot more data than plain-text emails. Nokia Messaging supports HTML and will continue to evolve while balancing out responsible data usage and delivering a user’s email.
Why does it take sooooooooo looooooong for Nokia Messaging to open an HTML email when one click on the ‘Display in HTML’ link?
Like previously mentioned, on some of our phones the HTML messages open within a web browser which takes a bit longer.
OK, then what about a unified inbox in Nokia Messaging? Wouldn’t this be an easy thing to do and a great way for you guys to beat Apple (they still haven’t managed it)?
Much of our research has shown that users prefer to have separate inboxes for their different accounts, which is what we delivered.
Anecdotally, my own personal conversations bear this out. Last year, I called a few dozen users around the world who had stopped using our service to see why they weren’t using it anymore and what we could do to make it better. A unified inbox was was one of the things I asked about. Many of them mentioned they actually preferred our separate inboxes to the Blackberry standard.
But nothing is sacred, and we are constantly learning from our users, so my question back to you would be: why are you looking to have a unified inbox, and which inboxes do you want together, and which would you want to keep separate?
Why is the header information in Nokia Messaging laid-out so strangely (the name of the sender on a different line to the word “From”, same thing for recipient and “To”)? Why not put each type of information on the same line? It’s such bad use of screen real-estate.
I agree, the spacing of the headers isn’t ideal. One thing this does is that the layout of the header is the same in all the languages Nokia Messaging comes in, around the world. To address this, we have designed the solution so that the message opens in the body of the email with the headers minimized at the top of the screen.
Do you have any plans to improve the homescreen widgets for Nokia Messaging? The ones you have at the moment show very little useful information (e.g., the sender and subject are always so truncated as to be next to useless and you can never see more than the last two emails)
The widget displays the number of unread messages along with the subject of the last two. If you’re following the news about Symbian’s updates, there are a variety of evolutions coming to home screen widgets.
You recently announced a new version of Nokia Messaging that does away with the ‘1 month’ limit on emails that can be synced and replaces it with an overall number limit. That’s an improvement for sure, but our question is simple: why can’t we have all our email, in all our folders, all the time?
Nokia Messaging is designed to be the best experience for getting all your Email, IM and Social Networking on your mobile device. The top five things people do with mobile email, in order are 1. Scanning the Inbox, 2. Deleting emails, 3. Reading Emails, 4. Replying to Emails And 5. Composing New Emails. Composing new emails is number 5.
The recent update increased the amount of emails stored on the device to 100 emails per inbox and 50 emails per subfolder. We are always looking at ways to increase the utility of Nokia Messaging
Nokia Messaging delivers push access to your latest email. Down the road, we are certainly looking for ways to deliver more historical emails to users, while sticking to our mission of reducing data traffic for users. Thanks for the feedback.
Most of the time, people want to be up to date with their most recent messages and check their email in 10-20 second use sessions. That’s our core use case, which we focused on delivering.
Why did Nokia choose to implement this push service model? What’s wrong with a really good implementation of IMAP IDLE which, for all intents and purposes, is as immediate as push email?
The Nokia Messaging servers use IMAP idle to connect with any provider that supports it, as well as other proprietary PUSH mechanisms to deliver the best solution to our users. In other email solutions, if a users has more than one email account; they would need an equivalent number of IP connections permanently open for IMAP IDLE. This would result in an increase of data usage as well as significantly impacting battery life. Nokia Messaging uses significantly less data to maintain the always-on, push email experience compared to a direct POP/IMAP poll every 15 minutes. We work closely alongside the big portals like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft to deliver the best mobile email experience for their users with Nokia devices.
This is one of many things Nokia Messaging does quite well that are not obvious from a single user’s perspective, but, play a big role in the fact that many operators are signing up for Nokia Messaging and offering their customers low-cost data plans.
Why have so many people reported delivery outages with Nokia Messaging? Do you have work underway to tackle this once and for all?
Service uptime is obviously an incredibly important barometer for us. We are doing significantly better here than we were in earlier stages and have plenty more in the works to continue to improve upon this.
We recently discovered – while desperately attempting to set-up your push service on our N86 – that the Nokia messaging client also supports a direct connection to any IMAP email service, thus negating a lot of the criticism we’ve made above about email retrieval and IMAP folder support. Why is this not more clearly advertised in the software? Why not make the choice easier for customers to understand?
Nokia Messaging is a service. In order to get the service out on devices already in the market when we launched our first beta in August 2008, we put out a separately installable client available from a website.
Today when you set up your email on a phone with a client that supports Nokia Messaging, it asks whether you’d like to use Nokia Messaging to get your email. We’ve worked to make the choice even more obvious on more recent phones (for example, on the E72). We are by no means denying the user any other option to get their email. Nokia allows its users to install other email clients from third-party software companies and use them on their devices.
Most recent (N86 8MP, E72, E75) and future devices’ built-in email client support a variety of protocols including Nokia Messaging, Mail For Exchange, and Direct POP/IMAP accounts.
What can we expect to see in the next 6 months from the Nokia Messaging team? What are you most looking forward to bringing to market?
We’ve got plenty more exciting developments for Nokia Messaging across Email, IM and Social Networking across S40, Symbian and Maemo. See our website for all the latest news.
You will continue to see us sign more and more operators that will offer their consumers low-cost plans giving them unlimited access to their Email and Instant Messaging on their Nokia – like this announcement at Mobile World Congress.
We are looking forward to continuing to make Email, IM and Social Networking easy-to-setup, easy-to-use, and easy-to-afford on all Nokia phones.
Thanks again Davis for submitting to the scrutiny of The Guide. We’ll let you get back to work and look forward to seeing the fruits of your labours.
Photo credit: The N97 home screen photo was shamelessly stolen from Symbian-Guru.
Nokia responds to our criticism of its Messaging software: An interview with Davis Fields
We’ve been rather critical of Nokia recently. First we dismissed the N97 mini as an also-ran in the premium, touch-screen race; then we wrote a rather curt letter to OPK, Nokia’s CEO; and finally we concluded that the E72 just didn’t live up to the high standards set by its predecessor: the E71. In each [...]
5 Responses to “Nokia responds to our criticism of its Messaging software: An interview with Davis Fields”
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netborn
22 February 2010
OK Davis, please read this carefully:
a) I don´t want a Mail Service, (Blackberry is miles ahead on this so if I want it I surely choose a BB), I WANT A RELIABLE, NICE AND EFFECTIVE MAIL CLIENT inside my U$S 600 Nokia Smartphone (N97 mini and E71 in my case). I understand that you need to please Operators, but and your customers what??
b) Why I have to pay a Nokia Messaging service to my operator (Movistar) when I already pay an unlimited data plan? (this is very funny, call Movistar to enable this crap and they tell you that you need to pay for the service, but hey, I already pay for the data service…) Again, if what I want is a messaging service with crappy middleware for sure I will choose BB.
c) Your HTML rendering is horrible, is not that you are saving our money, I don´t care, I have an unlimited plan, so give me the option to choose html (good one pls) or txt.
d) Yeah, great now you support Destinations, the only problem is that your convicted software will never release the AP, so if you are at home under wireless the life expectancy of your battery is zero. (Do you ever test your software???)
e) As said before, if you have more than one device your service is HELL, is funny that you talk about Nokia Care, well I invite you to South America, in many cases they simply don´t have a clue about new hardware (yes Mister, here the N97 mini si Science Fiction for Nokia Care), now imagine Services…
By the way, it took me six (6) months to reset an inbox password, and the funny thing is that was a Ovi Mail one…finally done thanks to someone in Nokia Europe.f) Why in hell Dataviz with RoadSync and Microsoft with Windows Live could made better (read BETTER) mail solutions that Nokia can? RoadSync is miles ahead of MfE, yes I know it´s paid, but hey, you are Nokia. Microsoft with the Windows Live Messenger installer put in your messaging menu a simple “hotmail” inbox, but you got: HTML, auto Sync, Destinations, and works.
g) Just curious, you are using a Nokia device with MfE and Nokia Messaging, if yes, you don´t see what is wrong????
Well, I am tired and need to work, but please, again we are talking about high end devices, please GIVE ME AN ACCORDING MAIL CLIENT, APPLE CAN DO IT, ANDROID CAN DO IT, MICROSOFT CAN DO IT, PALM CAN DO IT, IF YOU CANNOT PLEASE BUY OR HIRE SOMEBODY THAT CAN. IF YOU CANNOT BUY OR HIRE SOMEBODY THAT CAN DO IT, MAY BE IS TIME TO LEAVE YOU, IS INCREDIBLE THAT IN 2010 YOU CANNOT DEVELOP AN EMAIL CLIENT!!!!!!!!
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rafael pernia
6 July 2010
Hey Netborn, im form southamerica too and i need to reset my password. How did you reset yours? who helped you in Europe? Please help me this is my last try before sayin goodbye to nokia… its a shame that we, the customers, have to fix problems that nokia doesnt even seem to notice. Thanks
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Nokia Messaging Interview At Prodigal Fool | Symbian-Guru.com
24 February 2010
[...] everything works for me and nothing works for Dotsisx, or vice versa. However, our friends at The Prodigal Fool have apparently had a consistently poor experience, and reached out to the Nokia Messaging team to [...]
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Jim
25 February 2010
The interview was a good attempt, but ultimately disappointing. Field’s answers sounded like a canned press release, and it all boiled down to the same thing….legacy support.
Until Nokia pulls a Microsoft Windows Phone 7 and completely breaks backwards compatibility, they’ll continue to have software issues.
SymbianGuru
22 February 2010
Haha, I read through the whole interview and looked at all the photos and didn’t notice that was my homescreen (even says my name on the Facebook widget!) until I got to the bottom! Great post.