Meet Emily from our Ovi by Nokia Brand team

Hi, guys! How has everyone’s Monday started off? Well, grab a cup of coffee and dive with us into our next Ovi People Interview! This week I had the pleasure to have a chat with Emily Johnson who works in our Ovi Brand team in Tampere. Let’s see ...

Hi, guys!

How has everyone’s Monday started off? Well, grab a cup of coffee and dive with us into our next Ovi People Interview! This week I had the pleasure to have a chat with Emily Johnson who works in our Ovi Brand team in Tampere. Let’s see what I managed to dig out of Emily during our interview!

What do you do here at Nokia?

I work with the Ovi brand in our Brand Offering team. I’ve been working with Ovi since we first came up with the concept. I’ve been involved from the very beginning in the brand decisions, coming up with the name, figuring out what Ovi the brand means, developing the brand architecture and seeing where Ovi fits in the overall Nokia brand portfolio.

How long have you been working here and what other projects have you been working on at Nokia?

In June it will be 10 years exactly! I started off in software and the R&D area. I was creating user interfaces; I was basically writing the texts for the English user interfaces that you see when you open your phone, use the menus & settings and see warning notes or notifications. I was writing those for our Communicator products (the flip-open phones with QWERTY) and then continued on the same work with S60 platform phones.  I’ve also worked on the pre-cursor for Maemo that was called Series 90. Then, I’ve also worked as a Senior terminologist where we ensured that the tone of voice, style and look & feel of our user interfaces are consistent and seamless. From there I moved to the brand management team about 3 years ago and I’ve been working mostly with Ovi.

When you were working with those texts for the user interfaces, didn’t you ever want to smuggle in a “Dude, re-start your phone, like, now” text somewhere in there, just for kicks?

Yeah, we did sometimes fantasize about that, especially when we were working really late. I’m actually from the South, so we would start writing all the error messages in Southern  English like “Hey bubba. Ya’ll fixinta get ridda dis here file. I ain’t gonna ask ya agin.” We totally need more variance, US and UK English are not enough, we need Southern English and New York English somewhere in there That’d be a good idea even now, we could give out our user interfaces and all the lists of texts we use there and our fans could crowd source and translate dialects and share them with everyone else. It’s all moving towards open-source nowadays anyways, so why not?

That’d be so cool.

Agreed!

What did you do before you joined Nokia (work + education)?

I’m from the US so I started the Bachelor’s degree in sociology there, and then I lived one year in Estonia as an exchange student. When I was there, I got to Finland quite a bit and had a lot of Finnish friends there. Then I got a Fulbright Fellowship to Finland, and then stayed to do my master’s degree here. I studied Sociology in Tampere and at the same time I was teaching English to a lot of companies, Nokia being one of them. I taught, for example, business English and terminology courses. Then, when I was finishing my master’s degree, I wanted to have a steadier job than doing occasional teaching and that’s when my work at Nokia started.

Is there anything specific you like about working at Nokia?

Even though Nokia has changed a lot in the past 10 years, there’s always been – especially in Finland – this strong sense of purpose. Nokia’s such an important company in Finland and it’s really a company that put Finland on the map for a lot of people. It’s an interesting place to work in that sense, because there’s almost a sense of patriotism for Finnish people that work for Nokia. You’re kind of like working for the country.

I totally agree with that.

Well, there you go Being an American, you don’t really have a similar experience of patriotism in a company there, unless of course you work for the government or something. So there’s something unique about Nokia in that sense. Everything that Nokia does is reported everywhere and you see your work everywhere: in stores, in billboards, in the news, in political discussions…  You see what you’re doing everywhere. It gives you a really amazing sense of purpose.

What makes you passionate about what you do?

I think it’s mainly about what I said earlier about being able to physically see the results of your work and the feeling that you’re actually contributing to a greater goal. Working with Ovi has also been really inspiring, because you’re literally starting something new for Nokia and building a new brand.

What word is the first word that comes to your mind when you think about Ovi?

Open. That’s actually where Ovi’s name came from in the first place. Think about a door (Ovi in Finnish). It opens =)

What’s your favorite thing you’ve downloaded from Store? Why?

It may not be the most fun of apps, but it’s something I use every day and it’s the Helsingin Sanomat app. HS is kind of like our New York Times in Finland. I also recently downloaded the Food Network widget; it’s good but it’s fairly new so it’s not populated with recipes yet. I’m interested to see how it develops.

What was your very first Nokia device?

My very first Nokia device was actually a Mobira Cityman that was later killed so that Nokia can focus all of the mobile phone brands under Nokia, which is something that not a lot of people know. It was my first year in Finland and back then mobile phones were just taking off. I lived with a couple of roommates, and we had a landline phone. One of my roommates was horrible about paying for the bills and she never paid her part. Then we were like “whatever, let’s get rid of the landline and get mobile phones instead”.

What devices do you use right now and what do you mainly do with them?

Right now I have the N97 and I also have the N900, but my husband has commandeered it and taken it for his own use. With the N97, I mostly do the basic things; I like the home screen widgets, I read the news a lot on it and I use Google search (if I have to search for some information immediately). I also have PLENTY of phone conferences that I have to take part in so that’s also something that I use it for.

What were you looking for the last time you used Maps?

I just used it last week when I was on work trip in London. I was looking for the location of this one ice cream shop that a colleague had recommended.

What are your top five favorite blogs/websites?

I go to BBC food site a lot, you can do e.g. a search for certain ingredients and what’s “in season” right now and recipes for those… Also, this is probably really embarrassing to admit, but  I check out Fail Blog for some more light-hearted content ; ) I love all the “I can haz cheezeburger” blogs like Fail Blog and This is Photobomb. The guy who owns that network is probably a billionaire by now with all those blogs! I also read Comics.com and news sites such as the Arkansas Times (where I’m from) to keep up what’s going on in the home country.

What do you like to do in your spare time?

I love cooking, I actually almost became a chef =) I watch a lot of Food Network, Top Chef, BBC Food programs, etc. and we cook a lot during the weekends. I play a lot of tennis with my husband, and I also play basketball. I used to play in a women’s team here, but I don’t do so anymore. In the summer we wine tour around Europe, for example last year we went to Tuscany, or go to visit family in the U.S.

What’s your motto?

No mottos. That’s my motto

Is there anything you’d like to tell our readers here at the Ovi Blog?

We want you to keep coming back to Ovi, using the services and telling us what you like and don’t like. We want to improve and get better, and to hear that directly from people is the best way to do that. So keep the input coming!

Source : http://blog.ovi.com/2010/06/21/meet-emily-from-our...