Features

How to design products people can use - Alloy chief

After our enthusiastic welcome for the new Jornada Wireless Digital Assistant – combined phone and PDA from Hewlett-Packard - the man responsible for helping H-P in designing it , Gus Desbarats, suggested I might like to know something about the reasoning behind the neat little box.

He said: "Glad you like the new Jornada design! – would you like to know how we did it? Well, yes, I thought, I would.

Gus is chairman of Alloy Total Product Design, and is unusually well qualified to design high-tech hardware, having post-grad qualifications in both computers and design. He also started life designing gadgets for that arch-toy maker, Sir Clive Sinclair, at Sinclair Research – a tough apprenticeship. After that, he also spent some time with Atari, where he designed such legendary toys as the Portfolio, the world's first pocket Dos PC.

<1/> Gus Desbarats

These days, he designs phones, pocket computers, and any product with a chip in, which people might otherwise find hard to use.

It was a slightly surreal interview, because Gus thought I had a Jornada for review, and I haven't actually held one, yet. So a lot of the nice features he wanted to boast about, were things I was unaware of.

"You'll particularly want to know how we came up with the 'quick on the draw' feature," he said. I would, I said, if I knew what it was. So he had to explain that the new device allows you to hear the phone ring, pull the PDA out of your pocket and start speaking immediately you've opened it up – just like a phone.

And if you want to get at your diary, it's just as quick: "Fast movement from pocket to use; diary in two seconds," boasted Desbarats.

To understand why this is impressive, I suppose, you need to know that most PDAs aren't quite so quick on the draw. They tend to come with covers to protect the screen, and these covers take a while to open. And some of them also come inside a bag or case. "It's a little ritual - out of pocket, then out of bag, then up with lid, then find the stylus, then switch on – it is irritating," he said.

The Jornada has several little features, he says, to beat that frustration. "For example, we took the stylus out of the back of the case; and we put it in the lid, so it's there like a pen in an ink-well. And there's the two-screen concept ... "

It was particularly difficult to design a machine to meet his two-second benchmark, because he was keenly aware, he says, that he couldn't dispense with the protective cover.Not only did his focus groups show that people were paranoid about breaking the displays on their pocket PC, but HP users in particular expected this feature.

"HP has established a reputation as 'people who do protected screens.' We found a lot of people had had some exposure to the problem because of past experience,buying Palm Pilots. Experienced users were more immediately aware of it as an issue, but also more aware of the practicality. Others would see the big screens and feel a sense of vulnerability; it was raised by everybody. The experienced users would be the ones who knew that a bag wasn't enough, and would ask for a cover," he summarised.

The conversation was punctuated by cries of "Exactly!" as each of us agreed with the other on design points. For example, one of his hobby-horses is designing for users who are over 20. When I mentioned my puzzlement at the way people expect to sell expensive hardware to people whose eyes no longer focus on tiny screens with miniscule print unless they put on their reading glasses, Gus shouted: "Exactly! - we did a large-button cordless phone for BT, gone from zero to second-best selling product in a year."

People, says Gus, may be chronologically over 40; but the image of someone that age, has changed. "It's Mick Jagger we should be designing for, when we design for the 60 year old user - not a sweet old lady; their needs are not being addressed by the designer who is thinking in terms of an old-fashioned 1950s population ... the problem is, designers are not very good at designing for people other than themselves."

And I found myself shouting "Exactly!" when he started explaining how phone designers and PDA designers have to start thinking in modular terms; no longer, trying to get everything into one box, but designing a display module, and a wireless module, and a keyboard module, and an audio module, all linked to each other, preferably, by Bluetooth. Though, I must admit, he went strangely quiet when I asked him how on earth the Jornada WDA could have emerged onto the market without Bluetooth, if he understood that. He just said something about "future plans" and "confidential" and changed the subject ...

So I was quite happy to let him rant, a little, about his design philosophy.

"You have to have a creative philosophy driven by empathy for the user," Gus said. "And within the industries themselves, it's very difficult to get people to face up to humanistic issues as the drivers for innovation. Getting people that understand that they need a quality of interface to their chip, is very hard."

Gus reckons there's an arrogance - what he calls a "Cartesian arrogance" - a denial of the richness of humans, an approach overly focused on metrics - processor speed, pixel count, grammes, centimetres. "You tell them 'people aren't like that' - cognitive psychology has taken huge leaps and bounds in the last 15 years, but a lot of technical designers simply don't get it. Now that people are brain-mapping activity related to perception; you can actually talk about how customer judgement is formed - when Harvard Business School has a mind lab and talks about how customer perceptions are formed, you have to accept that cognitive psychology is a key driving science as to how products should behave."

There are reasons for bad IT product design, he says. The obvious one is the need for speed; a product has to be launched before it becomes obsolete. But there are bigger problems. "One of the hidden costs of Microsoft/Windows dominance, is that the user interface is hidden from the designer. If you think of Dell, you have no emotional attachment to their products whatever; the price and the performance has to be right, and beyond that, you feel no loyalty to them or have any sense that they care about what happens to you. They have to live with what Microsoft gives them, and they get no feedback ... "

Reading the company's blurbs is surprisingly consistent with listening to Gus: "Operating a cutting edge, Internet-based, Windows NT system, Alloy is able to communicate product design concepts directly and immediately with its clients, or their supply-chain partners based on the other side of the world. This design system allows the consultancy to integrate both the external and internal models (ergonomics and electronics) into a unified design process. Alloy makes this possible by customising techniques for creating photo realistic 3D models that can be viewed and altered via web browser."

It's corporate-speak, but you can hear the passionate designer behind it. The designer's initial models of the external contours are created in 3D graphics (EDS Unigraphics) and presented simultaneously in Alloy's UK offices and the client's research / marketing offices on the other side of the globe.

"So our client is then able to insert a model of the electronics directly into the 3D design / interface model, which can be refined by Alloy to create the final look and feel of the product. By employing this hybrid approach to design, we can help its clients achieve optimum value from the relationship, including breakthroughs in development times and productivity." OK, that doesn't sound much like Gus; but it is what he thinks (he says, pointing out the paragraph in his brochure) even if it is a lot more matter-of-fact.

I don't normally give this much space to self-important people with grandiose plans; with Gus, however, it was clear that he believes many of the things which I'm convinced will be important in the evolution of the personal, mobile data market over the next few years.

He thinks - for example - that it's completely silly to build the battery and the wireless chip into an earpiece for Bluetooth wireless headsets. As readers of these pages will know, I agree entirely: we don't need the weight of all that gear hanging off our ears. We'll be quite happy to have something quite solid clipped inside a pocket or pinned to a lapel, with a little quick-fit earpiece which you only put in when the phone rings, says Gus; I agree entirely.

What he likes to do, he says, is to design the function of the product, rather than being given a set of specifications, and an order to make them fit in a box.

"You can't have form following function if you aren't sure what the function is," he said, "and until you've worked out what the function should be, you can't design it. But the function is defined by what people will cope with in form. I think something like the Compaq iPaq is horrible, big, heavy, and will eventually go nowhere unless they quickly get away from that awful jacket. Yes, it's a popular device, but that's because once you buy something, in the belief it's portable ... you're committed. Once you've been conned, it's hard to own up, to admit you've been conned; and you have a practical imperative to use the thing, because you bought it for a purpose."

I look forward enormously to seeing the new Jornada. With Bluetooth and a headset?

"Mumble ... " said Gus ...

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