Sometimes fixing pain points may even generate new ideas that can become selling points for your product. In the early days of mobile communication, most phones were equipped with very simple contact lists. Although these lists supported names, the handling of them was very cumbersome.

One of the most successful early mobile phones was the Nokia 2110 (shown in Figure 9-1). It had a contact list where the user could add a name for phone numbers. Accessing the list was relatively easy, via a soft key labeled “Memory,” which could be accessed from standby mode. However, when pressing this soft key, you would be presented with a list of numbers organized according to their more or less random locations on the SIM card. The names of the contacts were not even visible.

To allow switching from SIM card—order mode to an alphabetical list of names, the 2110 was equipped with a dedicated key labeled “abc” (the top right button above the keypad in Figure 9-1). Most users would have to read the manual to understand what this key did, and few users actually read it. Since research and interviews showed that very few users were actually using the alphabetic contact list, the conclusion for many people in marketing was that users didn't actually want an alphabetical contact list—an incorrect assumption.

Luckily, the misguided people in marketing did not get their say. Keen and proactive user experience designers at Nokia managed to push through a radically new and later very successful redesign of the contacts list. This new design also made the abc key superfluous, which—due to the sparse real estate on the device-may have contributed to why the new contact list design was approved.