Samsung. Social Phonebook

2009 - Product Development - Samsung

TIMELINE

December 2008 ~ December 2009

BRIEF

“Integration of social networking services into the mobile operating system will enable mobile devices to function as true social hubs.”

Based on this premise, I led a series of intensive and exciting ideation sessions resulting in a number of prototypes that were proposed and developed. We designed a system wherein each contact’s page serves as a communication hub where you can see all your calls, SMS, and e-mail from that person, then touch the Activities tab to see their Facebook and Twitter updates, or go to the Media tab to see all their photos and videos. Integrated phonebook is now part of Samsung Social Hub – available for all Samsung mobile devices with TouchWiz3.0, the 3rd generation of Samsung touch phone UX platform.

TEAM

New Business Development and Incubation Team  (A multidisciplinary team to focus on 3~5 year development under product planning group for Samsung Mobile)

Reimagining Phonebook

This was my first task at Samsung in 2008 when social network service was the most popular subject in digital world. My team wanted to explore how phones facilitate people’s connected lives. I collected examples of different types of networking services and social experiments, and shared with our team and the design team.

Phonebook is where you see list of your contacts, but it is is not serving as a jumping point to connect to them nor providing me the best representation of the collection. Can we re-imagine phonebook?

Ideation & Concept Development

To explore this connected phonebook idea, I ran a design exercise with my team

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^ Design exercises

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^ Ideation session for initial concept creation

Final Screens

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^ The findings of the design execises were shared with design team who later designed Integrated phonebook as part of social hub and TouchWiz 3.0 (Samsung smartphone platform)

Press

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^ It was presented at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2010 and many media covered Samsung connected phonebook with great reviews.