interview with Mike Lundy

Tags: Conference,  Design
September 10, 2008 by Steven
Design for Mobile 2008 - North America's first mobile design conference, September 23 & 24
The Design for Mobile conference starts in less than two weeks, and we're finishing off the last preparations. Yesterday morning I went over to the Sprint campus, visited some friends and interviewed our two Sprint speakers. The first of them, with Mike Lundy of the device group, who will be sharing a device design case study on the Instinct.

Steven Hoober: What excites you about mobile?

Mike Lundy: Small screen design is just a lot more interesting to me than the web or PC counterparts. A lot more discipline is required. Everything can be a lot more elegant (if they'd ever listen). In web page design, the degree of freedom you have is almost overwhelming: wow, I could really screw this up if I wanted to. Because you can hide a lot of bad design practices on large screens and get away with it.

At the beginning it was hard but after a while it becomes almost an easier job because it becomes so easy to identify when you're doing something wrong, because it just jumps right off the screen at you.

SH: Tell me more about the difficulties of getting that elegant design actually bought off on by everyone.

ML: Well, it's a business, so when we started here we had black screens with green letters on them, and usability was something new for the web.

So the entire industry had progressed into color screens and higher levels of processing and about four years ago woke up to the fact that "oh my gosh, these things suck," we've pretty much thrown the kitchen sink at it, and it didn't work well. It didn't mean they were willing to take the time and spend the money to get it right at that time, but they started talking the talk, and honestly until the Instinct I feel that we didn't walk the walk at all.

This is the first instance there was enough competitive pressure on the quality of the interface, from the manufacturer that will remain unnamed, to make it actually happen.

SH: The iPhone effect has been hugely beneficial to raising the influence of UX in devices. But we're still very much in the first phase, "make it pretty," with skins on top of Windows Mobile devices, for example.

ML: Oh, yes, these phones use all this graphical horsepower to flip things around on the front screens, and then do nothing where the interface really needs it. There's a device that has no transition animations between carousel changes; the screen just blanks and then something flips around and you're back, and they've just made the wrong decision.

But you have to give Sprint credit, when the decision was made to make the iPhone competitor, they didn't say "just focus on the pretty," but wanted to focus on the experience, the usability. The challenge I had to face was they said, there you go" There's the hardware, there's the chipset, there's the memory, make it work. And if we wanted to make an iPhone grade device there need to be discussions about which processor and this screen and these technologies.

SH: So, how hard was that to deal with?

ML: Oh, it was terrible. Easily the hardest part of the whole design is that the platform was never designed to do what we asked it to do.

SH: Sprint has a unique perspective, at least amongst US carriers, in that you try to enforce a certain set of standards. What are your thoughts, experiences and problems with device diversity, or fragmentation?

ML: What we typically do with a carrier, vs. what we did with the Instinct have really no comparison. The thing about the Instinct is that regardless of who did the designs – and our team actually did do the design – the big change is that we developed a widget set, and framesets. We technically enforced consistency; we gave the tools to the developers, that when they use a button, it looks like everyone else's buttons. We used code to enforce the requirements, instead of using Word documents to enforce requirements.

That made it easier and faster for everyone to deliver a consistent product. Our current method of doing things on other phones is to meddle. We are not the owner of the overall design. So Samsung or Nokia or whoever comes to us with a phone, and that phone has a UI, with some thought and – good, bad or indifferent – there's some level of consistency behind it.

Then Sprint comes in and says, "here's 12 vendors we're gonna throw on your phone." These are all built in silos, so there are 13 different experiences on the phone, and by the way here's a set of requirements that meddle with your midly consistent approach, to try to make devices look consistent across Sprint.

Its well-meaning, but the results have not been good, except on very simple phones or certain vendors who are willing to give up control of their native OS.

SH: What emerging technology would change your job the most?

ML: By far the development of a true mobile platform. Something that Sprint adopts that allows for rapid development on multiple device platforms. The Instinct was brute-forced; we built a widget set, one for Brew, one for Java and and it was difficult, and it's not reusable. Its reusable by Samsung, on Samsung phones, but it's not something we can give to Sanyo and say "here's a widget set, put this on your devices."

If we get to the point I can create a platform, a framework to develop on, an "operating system" for lack of a better word, then it's a matter of outside, 3rd parties developing for it. Now we don't need to worry about developing and specifiying a calculator. Just pick the best one.

Device diversity, a problem Apple has punted on so far, would be largely solved with a single system that could be applied across devices and manufacturers.

SH: You've mentioned marketing and business needs. Would Sprint ever be likely to adopt a common platform.?

ML: If you choose to differentiate based on the experience – or you have an opportunity because everyone else is blowing it, then you want to be able to adopt something unique, that lets you say "yes, we are different." Now, if Android, or some "OS model Q" comes out and is just perfect, and you cannot differentiate on experience, or people habituate to the pattern due to high adoption, then you'll just fire the design team and move to that.

Until something like this happens, while 3rd party software and service solutions are being offered, the carrier is the only one who is in a position to enforce consistency and design, except for some Microsoft-ish OS giant taking over the entire industry. I can see it happening, but as far as an outside domination of the device OS industry, I don't see it any time soon.

If you want to see even more about this, be sure to sign up to attend Design for Mobile, September 22nd - 24th in Lawrence, KS.

Check back soon for an interview with our other Sprint speaker, Jason Ward, who manages field research for Sprint.

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