MeeGo UX Design Principles
Connected, Vibrant and Alive
MeeGo is designed to be connected to the web all the time. MeeGo’s applications should feel ‘alive’ with relevant and optimized activity, yet consider power consumption, and make the device a true life hub.
Task Switching & Multi-tasking
People’s daily lives are complex and busy.
We tend to do a lot of things at once and often the things we want to do involve two or more applications – making an appointment over the phone, sending a link to a friend, finding a listing on the map, watching a movie, and browsing the web at the same time.
MeeGo allows people to quickly move around running applications, which keeps them up to date and enables them to get something done.
Adaptive & Intelligent
MeeGo is intelligent, and adaptive. MeeGo learns from the users habits and it is adaptive in the sense that it surfaces objects that the user last used or uses the most, the albums he listens to the most, and the documents he read most recently.
Responsive
The UI must give immediate feedback to the user’s actions. When scrolling or panning, the moved objects need to follow user’s interaction without a noticeable lag.
Visual, audio and haptic feedback must feel that they are in perfect synch. The multimedia playback has high resolution and frame rate that gives a feeling of performance.
Getting the basics right
People still need to meet the demands of every day life, calling their mom, remembering the milk, and messaging a colleague from the bus stop, choosing a favorite song or TV channel.
MeeGo should make these things a joy and never be a distraction or overly elaborate.
Simply beautiful
The UI must please all senses. Visual, aural and haptic feedback must be beautiful, yet
simple. Visual, aural (and haptic) metaphors and effects must be consistent. Decoration should have meaning, for example to show what can be touched. The UI is alive, for example showing subtle animations.
Plug-ins & Framework support
MeeGo offers frameworks which improve the user experience, ease and speed up the development.
Same kind of functionality should be aggregated into one single consistent experience. For example, multiple instant messenger clients should be bundled into one place, instead of having multiple IM applications on the device. A single plug-in is normally much easier to develop than a full UI for service features.
In addition, service providers should hook into all core frameworks of the platform, like the notification framework accounts and SSO framework or content framework and tracker database.
