Nokia’s vice president of design for smartphone devices, Nikki Barton, has spoken to Forbes about Nokia’s Lumia design story.
“Nokia traditionally has had a culture built around simplicity of use, clarity,” she said. “It’s also had a color story. In the last few months I’ve seen that culture starting to grow around the Lumia and Windows Phone.”
Barton refer to the “heads-up” philosophy that Nokia’s head designer, Marko Ahtisaari that there should be as little visual interaction with the phone as possible; using it should be almost instinctive. The philosophy obviously resonates strongly with Windows Phone’s Glance and Go paradigm.
Future iterations of Lumia phones will see it further “refined,” and simplified as much as possible, and go further with the instinctive-use credo, Barton explained.
Speaking about the Lumia handsets, she said “We’ve won a lot of awards, which is great, but when people get it in their hands they realize how powerful it is.”
“I’m extremely proud of what we’re producing. That’s what drives me personally.”
She said “there’s some amazing social media marketing strategy” coming from Nokia soon, but for now, Nokia has to hope that the vivid colors, simplicity and its heads-up philosophy will create a brand culture appealing enough for more customers to want to jump on board.
“The Lumia’s design is just such a game changer,” the designer added, “It’s the beginning of something big.”
