Ten years ago this week, Palm Computing debuted the Pilot 1000. 1996 seems like eons ago, but the major PDA market has been around for a very short amount of time, really. The primitiveness of that first machine is striking today; but what is even more striking is how the limitations of its hardware made it easier to use. It is a supreme example of constraints leading to superior creativity and execution.

Today even our cellphones have more computing power and graphics capability than those first Palms. In part, I think the relative lack of constraints on our cellphone designers have led them to become sloppy with their design choices, leading to products that are harder, less efficient, and more confusing to use. The designers are not doing their editorial duties. How many clicks, for example, does it take to edit an address book entry on your cellphone?

In the book Information Appliances and Beyond, author Eric Bergman interviews Rob Haitani. Haitani was the software architect at Palm and designed the Pilot’s OS and applications, and then followed Palm founder Jeff Hawkins to Handspring. This is one of the single best essays on UI and experience design that I’ve ever read - I return to it on a regular basis as a refresher. (There are several other excellent essays in this book, I highly recommend it overall. In particular the article about the development of the Psion PDA OS is also outstanding.) I’m going to quote a few things from the Haitani interview here (and hope that Bergman and Haitani don’t mind!).

We assumed we’d reject every feature unless there was a good reason not to. Saving files. Printing. By being merciless, at the end we were left with a very tight core of an operating system.… It all comes back to less is more. That’s because in handheld devices you have constraints that you don’t face with a desktop PC. (p.98)

Jeff [Hawkins] believed we had to make the product considerably smaller than current PDAs. He carved up a piece of wood in his garage and said this is the size he wanted. He’d walk around with this block in his pocket to feel what it was like. I would print up some screenshots as we were developing UI, and he’d hold it and pretend he was entering things, and people thought he was weird. He’d be in a meeting furiously scribbling on this mockup, and people would say, “Uh, Jeff, that’s a piece of wood.” (p.83)

Not enough designers spend time “eating their own dog food” as the expression goes, which partly explains the many confounding choices that lead to poor user experiences in complex gadgets.

On the Zoomer [the failed precursor to the Pilot], our philosphy was that we should put as many applications as possible in to make as many people happy as possible. After it shipped, though, we did some user research that made us question that decision. We found that there were a few applications that people used extensively, and usage very quickly dropped off after that. So we said why burden the product with all this extra functionality if people aren’t going to use it?…. When you’re in Silicon Valley the tech frenzy starts feeding on itself, and you end up losing context of what real people do with real products. (p.86)

To compensate for the slow processor in the Pilot, Haitani tried to strip all operations down to as few steps as possible to speed things up for the user. This caused a lot of arguments.

[S]omeone would say, “That’s just one more tap,” or “That would only take a second.” I would respond that it is analogous to the way you organize your desk in your office, in that you have some things on top of your desk and you have some things in drawers or file cabinets. Why is that? Well, if you look at the things on top of your desk, those are the things you use very frequently and they need to be easily within your grasp; whereas things in your drawer you don’t use as frequently. So I would say, Imagine taking something you use all the time like your mouse or the phone and put it in a drawer. It’s just one extra step to pull it out. But if you use it that frequently, the cumulative effect of that one extra step is excruciatingly annoying. (p.89)

Customers ask for features like kids ask for candy. In handheld design, you have to make the trade-offs for them. Robust functionality isn’t a benefit; it’s a cop-out. (p.99)

I wish more products today of all kinds followed these guidelines. Our lives would be a lot easier and less complicated as a result. We’ve know these things for a long time now - Palm employed them 10+ years ago, but didn’t invent them all. Why are we still having crappily designed electronic devices foisted on us?

It's a sad truth that many technologies don't reach their ultimate expression until they are in their twilight years, while in the process of being superseded by a new technology that is (take your pick) cheaper, smaller, faster, more convenient, more efficient. Such is the case LP record reproduction today. What's that you say, you can still buy Long Playing records? The old-fashioned 12" vinyl black disk, almost 100 years old as a technology, has not died out, and I'm not just talking about DJ's spinning old Parliament recordings. The analog LP is in a healthier state now more than at any time in the last 15+ years, along with associated equipment - turntables, arms, cartridges- that are in greater proliferation than at any time since the 1970's. And the quality of the sound and the beauty of the physical aesthetics and the attention to the engineering have never been better. They put, in fact, any iPod or mainstream CD player to shame.

High-end turntables deliver an experience that transports you through space and time to the place of the original recording. Done right, it's spooky. 

 
No records are available through mainstream outlets. Don't expect them to make a resurgence at Best Buy. Likewise, the equipment to play them is esoteric to the extreme (with prices to match) and requires seeking out at specialty audio stores. But if you have the opportunity to see one of these beautiful monstrous machines, and to hear it with equipment that can properly convey the delicate signal through to the speaker voice coils, you won't be able to go back to mp3s (or most CD's) again with much satisfaction.

Since the very earliest days of the "CD revolution" in the early 1980's, audiophiles have held that LP's continue to surpass CD sound. But the convenience of the CD far outweighed sonic consequences for the mass market, especially since most were listening on poorly set-up, price-point designed turntables with dirty records. That experience compared to these new turntables is as like McDonalds to the French Laundry. There simply is no comparison.

(We are in a similar state today with mp3's: Worse sound than CD's (considerably worse at their usual 128k bitrate), though more convenient. And indeed, high-end CD players (we're talking $20,000 here) are now just revealing what can be done with the bits in the silver disks. And it's just matched top-flight analog.)

So what are these crazy LP lovers buying?

Ultimately they are buying an experience that transports them through time and space to the location and time of the original recording, with all the subtleties intact. This is placeshifting and timeshifting, old school style. With a well set up high-end system you don't have sound coming from two speakers, you have an entirely new room placed in front of you. You can audibly tell the difference between the singers chest cavity and her mouth. The drums are several feet behind her, with the cymbals above and snares on either side. Other musicians are arrayed around, with the gaps between them clearly evident. Each person occupies a point in space that is three dimensionally defined - voices are 5 feet above the floor, guitars at waist level, feet tapping time are gently heard at floor level. The size of the room, even what the walls are made of, can be heard. When done right, with a good recording, it makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck it's so spooky.

Analog buyers are certainly not buying ease of use. In this sense, turntables violate major rules about user experience as it is defined today. These machines are finnicky to set-up to the extreme, and while it's true some pleasure can be had from the tweaking, over time it becomes tiresome. (Ultimately this was what caused me to sadly largely abandon analog, and I certainly never had the income to touch any of the products you see here!)

But let's consider what a turntable must do. The smallest grooves on a record are tiny, and must be decoded by a diamond being scraped through the groove with so much pressure that it momentarily melts the vinyl as it passes. The grooves correspond to the air waves that hit the microphone at the recording studio, literally an analog of the original event. If you were to scale the back and forth movements the stylus makes as it travels the grooves up to the size of an inch, the pivot point of the tonearm holding the cartridge would be almost a quarter of a mile away. It's no wonder then, that these high end turntables have platters (the disk the record sits on) weighing over 30 lbs, some made out of granite! Weight translates to stability and vibration reduction, the holy grail of analog reproduction, which is why the $18,000 Kuzma Stabi XL weighs almost 200 lbs. It also means there is so much flywheel effect that the tiny speed variations of the motor are smoothed out, meaning sustained notes keep a constant pitch.

Getting all the pieces to work just so is very difficult, both for the manufacturer and the user. This is not a push button operation. The cartridge (or more precisely, the stylus it holds) must be positioned at just the right orientation in 3 dimensional space to hit the grooves at the optimum angle, with just the right counter-balancing pressure. Trial and error are the only way to really hone in on these, with increments of fractions of degrees and grams.

Complicating the fact is the LP's come in different thicknesses, which affects the angle of attack for the stylus. Dedicated audiophiles adjust the height of the arm up and down accordingly per LP.

But, gosh, just look at the beauty of these things. Koetsu cartridges, such as the Onyx Platinum seen here, are made by a revered Japanese company, each one custom made by hand in extremely limited numbers, and outrageously expensive.

The turntables themselves have become fantastically over-engineered. Typically styled as conglomerations of multi-sized cylinders, these are works of art that reproduce art, and priced accordingly. The choices of materials are both sumptuous and pragmatic, having to deliver the performance as well as pride of ownership. They demonstrate ingenious thinking to defeat what are fundamentally fairly basic, yet difficult, physical problems (mostly having to do with handling vibration), and what’s so great about it is that it’s all so visible. Turntables are like bicycles - the engineering is manifestly visible, and it’s easy to see how the physical form into functional purpose. This makes them much more interesting than the black-box CD players that have long since superseded them in the marketplace.

I'll be the first to admit that these are extravagent, indulgent devices. No doubt about it. Only the very rich get to play here. But personally, I find it heartwarming that there are people who will persist in spending a lot of time creating something that most other people find pointless, and which in the market logic of corporate-think, would never get made.

Google gives all its engineers Fridays to work on their own pet projects. With this one stroke they have tackled two thorny problems:

1. Converting from the "rubber meets the sky" of corporate R&D labs to the "rubber meets the road" of product development has been a hit and miss proposition at best. Xerox, AT&T, IBM, NEC and others have gone through waves of success and lack of success at monetizing their labs investments. Lately IBM has been doing a terrific job with fundamental R&D leading to developments in hard drive storage and super computing, among other things, but for most labs the record is spotty.
2. Finding opportunities at the edges requires a lot of smart eyes and ears and hearts and minds to be on the look out for the next big thing while it's still very small. Converting your whole organization into a trend-spotting machine is the ideal, but has never (to my knowledge) been done. The Google approach gets pretty close and gives it great peripheral vision.

It's clear from its behaviors that Google is working on a wicked problem. What that problem is, no-one really knows, perhaps not even inside Google. 

The drawback is that you potentially have an overwhelming number of ideas to sort through, not all of which are necessarily applicable or viable from a business point of view. There is a risk, in other words, of a hefty innovation surplus, which can be distracting and a drain on resources.

Google addresses this by having a single person, Marissa Mayer, act as a first-pass editor of what makes it further up the chain for review by a committe including founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Mayer was featured in a BusinessWeek article a few months ago which describes her as bridging the gap between MBA's and PhD's:

 

She helps decide when employees' pet projects are refined enough to be presented to the company's founders. Such decisions are often made through an established process, with Mayer giving ideas a hearing during her open office hours or during brainstorming sessions. Yet she is also good at drawing out programmers informally, during a chance meeting in the cafeteria or hallway.

 

Mayer's hybrid background is ideal for this position as it provides her a well-rounded perspective from which to view the nascent ideas and consider their viability: addressing user needs, business fit, brand fit, technology fit. On the one hand this approach avoids the heavy bueracracy that can plague large organizations' innovations efforts, but on the other hand its hard to see how this will scale as Google continues to grow at a prodigious rate. More Marissa Mayers will be needed at some point, and they will need a similar mix of pattern experience that lets them see how new ideas connect with top-level business goals.

But Mayer also describes a mode of understanding through practice that involves rapidly and cheaply making solutions to see if they've tackled the right problem (or if there's really a problem at all), and not worrying too much about failing on the way (easy enough when you've got Google's market cap, but let's keep in mind it's how it got that way):

What Mayer thinks will be essential for continued innovation is for Google to keep its sense of fearlessness. "I like to launch [products] early and often. That has become my mantra," she says. She mentions Apple Computer and Madonna. "Nobody remembers the Sex Book or the Newton. Consumers remember your average over time. That philosophy frees you from fear."

These attributes make it clear that Google is working on a wicked problem. No-one knows what it is, exactly, outside of Google (and even within the company not many might), though guesses are starting to be made, such as displacing Microsoft by coming at its core OS and applications businesses from a very different angle than head on. That's the nice thing about wicked problems - they can be fiendishly difficult to decode from outside, which makes being a competitor very tough and tends to put you in a fast-follower position. As Google's master plan continues to play out, more of the wicked problem will become evident. I expect at the end we'll all slap our heads at the obviousness of it, but so far they're doing a good job of playing their cards close to their chest.

State of Mind 2: Full Contact

(Last in my series of postings on wicked problems, based on my talk from the About, With & For Conference last fall.)

All of the attributes for addressing wicked problems talked about so far have one thing in common: hands-on experience and in-the-trenches work. Wicked problems are a full-contact sport.

There are two aspects to this. You need to have full contact with your customers (and potential customers, and past customers) to really understand their stated and unstated needs, their met and unmet needs. Don’t just rely on surveys and service follow-up calls, or meeting them on the golf-course. Meet the rank and file where they live, where they work - wherever they use your product. While ethnography is becoming more prevalent as an approach, it’s still under-utilized when it comes to solving wicked problems. This is unfortunate as it’s about the best tool we have at the moment for spotting interesting things at the periphery.

Second, you need to encourage and allow full contact of all the stakeholders involved in the wicked problem: marketing, engineering, design, manufacturing, sales, partners and vendors, executives. For sure this will cause sparks to fly, but when solving a complex systemic problem like a wicked problem, you need to get the whole system in one room so that everyone can see and hear the perspectives of others. By letting this process run its course, you will arrive at a well-rounded understanding of, and agreement on the problem.

It’s tempting to cut this process short if things don’t seem to be moving toward resolution quickly enough, or try to corral it when it appears to be going off course, but these are natural parts of the process. Short-changing them will mean that you are short-changing your competitive advantage by not going deep enough into understanding the problem.

State of Mind 2: High Panic Threshold

It was said of the great Wayne Gretzky that he had the highest panic threshold of any player in professional ice hockey. He would hang back with the puck waiting for the optimum moment to strike. Other less experienced players would panic and prematurely make their move, while he would have the patience and the ability to see the converging patterns of movement.

Wicked problems are like this in that it’s very tempting to jump in and start prematurely defining them (“taming” them to use Rittel’s word). A sense of impending panic can set in as the problem continues to defy definition, leading to a premature (and incorrect or incomplete) statement of the problem and its solution. Ihor Stelmach writes, “The pause, in fact, can be as effective a move in hockey as the quick break, but much more difficult to do as one is based on pure adrenaline and the other on pure nerve.”

It takes discipline and nerve to be able to wait. But this doesn’t mean never committing - that’s fatal too. It just means not committing prematurely.