Ovi OS

Racing through time

Rewind to 2008. It was a time to create a new OS that will take over the mobile app ecosystem, a challenger to Symbian, iOS. Android was starting. When you aim to create a global ecosystem platform, an OS, the design system needs to be thorough, not just an afterthought for lipstick on a pig. The project lived for 4 years until the demise of Nokia.

I keep it in my folio because making an OS with such scale and vision with vertical control is rare. It is often to one particular industry, which is yet challenging to achieve.

You can view the first release press coverage here.

Ways of Working

We were like a start-up as the team was growing fast by acquisitions. We learned agile and its philosophy of agile and how to work better within the waterfall culture of a hardware company.

Key Moment

The design system and UX clinics done by us enabled the on-boarding of the third-party application developers and publishers worldwide.

The supporting guidelines documentation (3 sets of documents, totalling + 200 pages) was an intentionally black and white screen to prevent any leaks to the press by the partners.

"You should have done as an online doc"

I guess it would have been after the rollout and onboarding of the first publishers. While in the process of refining, distributing for inputs to many stakeholders, at the time it was easier for us to keep it as a document for confidentiality. Remember, it was in 2009, Microsoft 360 did not exist, I was creating a "wiki" page for share.

Learnings

Underlying success factor: Leadership trusting design team and investing in us.
To maintain quality, it is a teamwork between designers and developers.
Testing with the end-user before the development and not deprioritizing Design QA was essential to produce quality components.

Team

Design director /PO Daryl Feldman
Senior UX designer Akemi
+ 4 Interaction designers
+ 2 Visual designers
+ 1 Researcher
+ 3 Freelance designers

Tasks

+ UX design on the twenty reference apps. The reference app is a model to follow to guarantee the best UX by using the platform.
+ Leading Community of Practice with respective feature teams ' designers.
+ Ovi UI portfolio management for the VP of design.
+ Design audit for Nokia's new phones.
+ UX clinics for the third-party app developers in China and in Europe.

Selected Works