LG and Samsung hire visual design academics in order to counter iPhone’s user interface

13th August, 2010 by adina
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LG and Samsung have recently hired design professors in order to improve their user interfaces’ quality. LG was the first to hire Lee Kun-pyo, dean at Korea Institute of Advanced Technology, to coordinate its Design Management Center. Samsung also hired Jung Ji-hong, professor of Visual Communications Design at Kookmin University, who will oversee the smartphone interface design in the company’s Mobile Design Group.

Both companies have recurred to recruiting such specialists in order to stress touches of their own custom interface to distinguish them from their competitors, especially the iPhone. Although Samsung and LG are larger phone manufacturers, they are still significantly behind Apple as well as much of the smartphone market. In Korea only, Apple has sold about 840,000 iPhones, while its best competitor, the Omnia II of Samsung, has hardly managed to sell half this number.

Both Samsung and LG have been developing their own custom interfaces but their results were not as spectacular as expected. Thus, users of the Behold II of Samsung, and even those of the Galaxy S, have regularly said that the customized interfaces were the weakest points in their designs. Meanwhile, the iOS interface has been often cited as Apple’s most important feature.


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