Nokia X1 Lcd Ways
Jenette Bregantini
Six years ago I wrote a blog championing positive change for girls through engagement in STEM, an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. At that time, the trend for women graduating with STEM degrees had experienced a significant decline from the previous decade. Unfortunately, this trend has not improved much in 2021. According to the World Economic Forum, only three percent of students joining information and communication technology (ICT) courses globally are women. This statistic improves slightly to five percent for math and statistics courses. Engineering, manufacturing and construction courses enjoy only a slight increase to eight percent.
I am proud to work at Nokia because our diversity and inclusion programs as well as our top leaders demonstrate the commitment to having a workplace where both men and women have equal opportunities to succeed in every function and at every level. Our essential guiding principles for our ways of working are all about being open, fearless, and empowered. This is the right type of environment for women and men to flourish in the workplace. Now we need to ensure that the pipeline of female talent increases by encouraging our daughters, nieces, and other young women in our lives about the excitement and impact a STEM career can have.
Aimee is an international marketing professional and published author. She has 20+ years of product, customer and brand marketing experience for B2B and B2C markets in the US, UK and Germany. She currently leads corporate programs within the Brand team of Nokia Corporate Affairs and is known for her rare combination of awesome organizational skills and unwavering optimism.
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Christian Kraft recently left his position as Principal Innovation and User Experience expert at Nokia Beijing, having spent 14 years previously as Senior Manager, Concept Innovation and User Experience at Nokia Denmark.
Prior to Nokia, Kraft worked at Cetelco/Hagenuk as a Software Engineer and User Interface Designer, and at Sony as a User Interface Specialist. Kraft has also written a book, User Experience Innovation: User Centered Design that Works, which was published by Apress in 2012. A visionary with over 100 patents to his name, Kraft was behind both threaded SMS Chat and the front-mounted roller-key, among many other Nokia innovations.
Newnham: What first excited you about technology?
Kraft: As a child growing up in a town called Fredericia in Denmark, I would say Lego was a key element in my interest in creativity. I was very fond of playing with Lego far into my teenage years. Today, it is difficult to say what was so fascinating about it, but looking back, it was about creating something not seen before and about pushing the narrow limits of Lego further.
It was using this very manual method to do machine code for my Colour Genie, I managed to make a game inspired from the TRON movie and also, actually, very similar to the much later Snake for Nokia mobile devices.
Newnham: Tell me what happened when you graduated. What was the industry like back then?
Kraft: When I graduated, I had no real dream or idea what kind of job I wanted. I did know that I wanted to travel though, so I applied for around 80 jobs in other European countries, but with no luck. The employment situation for engineers was pretty bad back then, so I ended up just applying for everything and ended up with a job at Cetelco/ Hagenuk, just 20 kilometers away from Aalborg. This would have been January, 1992.
Cetelco was a spin-off of Shipmate, which was developing and manufacturing GPS positioning systems for ships and boats. Before I joined Cetelco, it was bought by German-based Hagenuk, but they still used both brands for their products.
When I joined Cetelco, it was manufacturing mobile phones for the analog NMT (Nordic Mobile Telephone) system. They had also just started a project to develop digital phones for the GSM system (Global System for Mobile Communications). GSM was the first digital standard being applied to mobile communication, and it was still being specified in the ETSI forum (The European Telecommunications Standards Institute is an independent, nonprofit, standardization organization in the telecommunications industry), so targeting GSM was difficult since standards were still in progress.
At the time, mobile communication was quite a big industry in the North of Denmark (North Jutland), with several companies working in the area, and there was a level of cooperation among the companies back then. The first mobile phones from Cetelco were therefore codeveloped with Dancall, another big player from the NMT days, and they worked together so that the engine for the devices from both companies would be developed together, but all the user interface (UI) and other parts were done individually by each company. It was an interesting approach, and almost all mobile phones are actually developed like that today. You get a standard engine from a third party, and then you develop your own UI and design on top of it, although, at this time, there were very few players actually designing phones for GSM; Alcatel, Motorola, Ericsson, Siemens, and Nokia were some of the pioneers, together with the companies in North Jutland.
The MT-2000 and its predecessor, the MT-900, also had what I believe to have been the first-ever implementation of soft keys for a mobile phone. Nokia is often quoted to have created this innovation, but products from Hagenuk/Cetelco and Siemens were a couple of years ahead.
The main device we developed together with Siemens was the Sony CM-DX 1000, which, compared to the similar Siemens model, had a novel pop-up earpiece that was used to answer and end calls, and to lock the keypad when down.
Newnham: You then went on to Nokia. What were some of the most exciting times for you there?
Kraft: I joined Nokia in Copenhagen in 1996 when Nokia was number three in the mobile phone business after Motorola and Ericsson. The spirit in the small Copenhagen office was quite amazing, with a clear focus on becoming number one.
With Nokia, I started working across projects and platforms. I was often working as a UX consultant for a large number of phone projects and giving ideas for new UI and UX innovations. This is how I built up my credibility in the area of UX and innovation, and it was also how I learned to focus UX innovations to become not only patentable but also marketable.
In this role, for instance, I suggested highly-marketed SMS Chat functionality for the Nokia 3310. I also designed a novel music-slider function for music-driven Nokia products. At the same time, I was also working as a UX strategist in designated teams, led by some famous UX profiles like Christian Lindholm and later by Harri Kiljander, and I also worked closely on many tasks with Erik Anderson.
I was probably very difficult to put in a box; I was highly driven by creating great products that consumers would love. Creating patents was a secondary thing that was just a nice additional effect of creating innovations.
My understanding of what consumers may want also led me to later join the product planning for Nokia Entry business unit, focusing on creating true value for lower-income markets. Creating innovation for high-end devices often seemed easier, since there was a budget for adding new functionality, but I truly loved the challenge of delighting consumers, even with a very limited budget.
Newnham: You mentioned threaded SMS Chat earlier, how did you come up with the idea for that feature?
Kraft: I was consulting on the 3310 program, which had a great, young product manager, Lone Srensen. She wanted to create a relatively low-cost product that appealed to younger people because at that time, mobile phones still had a businessman status attached to them. So, the 3310 was to have exchangeable covers in many colors, and Lone set up a number of cross-functional innovation sessions to find some other truly marketable functionality for young people.
This was a real Eureka moment for me. Yes, I knew about chat functions on social websites, but this was the first time I saw the same usage pattern on a mobile phone. At that time, handling such an SMS conversation was highly complicated. If you were, for example, writing a reply and a new message came in, you would have to quit the SMS editor, read the new message, and then find the saved draft message through the menu in order to continue writing the reply.
Before the iPhone, Nokia was seen by consumers as having the most intuitive and simple user interfaces, and I believe that I contributed a lot to that, which makes me very proud and happy. However, as I said earlier, happy consumers are what drive me, not having a patent.
SMS Chat was one of the easiest innovations I made, but the impact on the market was tremendous. The 3310 had other selling points, but I heard from a lot of teenagers it was the SMS Chat feature which they thought was cool, so that also made me very happy.
I have some patents around the ability to send pictures from one phone to another and the first ever downloadable animations for mobile phones. These innovations were leading the mobile phones away from being purely text-oriented to being much more multimedia-oriented.
Again, I feel a bit sad when looking at the strategic mistakes Nokia made when the touch-driven devices started coming out. Nokia used to move quite fast when the market or consumers were changing, but something went wrong in this case.
Newnham: Had you always been someone who came up with creative and innovative solutions to problems, even in your personal life?
Kraft: I am probably not the typical inventor type who makes all sorts of small improvements and experiments at home. I think my innovation capability comes instead from seeing and experiencing problems for myself, for friends and family, and for people on the street.