Nokia crowdsource smartphone
By James • Mar 19th, 2010 • Category: Nokia
- Photo: Nokia
Nokia, once seen as a very insular and guarded company, is doing everything it can to shake this legacy. Not only has the phone manufacturer embraced the developer community by making Symbian open sourced and forged partnerships with other great companies like Intel, it is now crowdsourcing its next Nokia smartphone on a website where users can specify what they want.
The crowdsourcing experiment
- Photo: Symbian
The initiative, called Design By Community, has users switching sliders according to their preference and wants in a Nokia smartphone. The Finnish company has put in place mechanisms that would prevent users from selecting conflicting designs, as well as parameters to force them to choose more ambitious designs if their initial choice set is underwhelming, and, on the flip side, slightly more realistic designs if the choice set is too outlandish.
The Nokia smartphone experiment is happening over phases, with different selection options available in future. This current round focuses on the inputs on the device and its displays, with the next round of Design By Community scheduled to kick off on 22 March with shape and size taking centre stage.
Listening to users
- Photo: Nokia
This new openness and willingness to listen to their user base can serve Nokia in one of two ways – it can guide its engineers who merely sample what users say they want coupled with what the team believes users actually want. On the other hand, it could lead Nokia down a road where it is trying to please too many people at once and end up satisfying nobody. And, since Nokia is in such a giving mood, perhaps the company will cave in to the fan demands for MeeGo on the N900.
The consumer feedback Nokia gets from crowdsourcing and Design By Community will most probably be positive, but what that feedback yields in terms of build quality will be seen when only once this lengthy, albeit fun, process is over.
Tags for this article: symbian, nokia smartphone
