Handset UI & GUI — Mass-Production Line-up

Forty-one handset and tablet programmes between 2008 and 2014, for a manufacturer shipping to carriers in several markets while the platform underneath changed three times.

Every model arrives with its own screen, its own keys, and an operator that wants something the last one did not. What is right for an open-market phone in Europe is wrong for the same handset at a US carrier, and wrong again in Russia or China.

At that rate the work is not designing screens. It is holding a line of them together while everything underneath moves. Feature phone to TouchWiz, TouchWiz to Android, Android to Bada and Tizen — and the base interface has to come through each of those recognisably itself.

So most of the effort goes into what gets decided once: the menu tree, the widget conventions, the base screens every model inherits, and the point at which a market’s requirements are allowed to change them.

Forty-one programmes over seven years, from model graphics through carrier and regional variants to mass production.