John Wang momentarily wears a distant look on his face.
How to convey a sense of the process at HTC Corp.’s MAGIC Labs that resulted in the Touch device and its innovations?
(The Touch launched globally this past summer and arrives at Sprint Nextel Corp. next week. It is touchscreen-only and takes commands from swipes of the finger, or jabs of a stylus, though it includes a virtual QWERTY keypad as well.)
“We work as an innovation center, but we behave like a business,” Wang said of the balance between open-ended, pure innovation and the pressure to bring new devices and features to market.
“Do you care about the user experience?” Wang asked rhetorically. “If you do, you must examine every aspect of that experience.”
In developing its recent array of devices, including the Touch, Tilt and Shift (the mini-laptop), HTC’s engineers spent copious amounts of time observing device users, questioning every aspect of their behavior and interaction with their devices.
They noted the posture of the user, often bent over their messaging device, thumbs ablaze. But with the advent of broadband networks bringing long-form video and movies to the handheld, a more ergonomic device was needed so the user could relax. (Result: the HTC Tilt, a device arranged around the QWERTY keyboard, screen tilted to mimic the desktop experience.)
They looked at the boot-up time on laptops and power drain on devices that, step-by-step, brought forth the e-mail client and its queue. (Result: The Shift, a mini-laptop that uses minimal, standby power to maintain an always-on profile that signals incoming e-mail and offers subject line and even simple text content on standby power alone, so the user can determine whether to go further and eat up precious power.)
They saw that bezels on a touchscreen device prevented an easy swipe of the finger across the display and the user fatigue inherent in drilling down through menus, clicking, clicking. (Result: The Touch.)
With the Touch device, HTC engineers and marketers knew they had to wrap the new device with new industrial design that employed CMF-colors, materials and finishes-to set their product apart from the competition.
One other driver: HTC’s ambitions to move from the shadows-providing devices it designed for operator branding-to build a global brand of its own.
“Every action we took was deliberate,” Wang said. “There was no holding back.”
The Touch launched globally and, after HTC executives met with Sprint Nextel in spring this year, the latter quickly decided that the device could help it compete at a time when it needed star power in its portfolio. (The Touch bears the HTC logo, the first such device to hit the United States.)
Which market segment is the $250 Touch at Sprint Nextel aimed at?
“The ‘right’ answer,” Wang said in all honesty, drawing nervous looks of anticipation from his PR and marketing executives, “is that Sprint and HTC will say it’s the consumer in this fourth quarter.”
“The ‘true’ answer,” he said, smiling, “is people with dual uses. Business people want simplicity too.”
His team smiled, relieved that their star had not gone too far.
“Windows Mobile is a flexible platform,” Wang added. “We want to leverage that. Ultimately, we are accountable for the user experience through the user interface. We are free to build value on top of Windows Mobile.”
Wang returns to the present and resumes his narrative in earnest, down-to-earth terms.
“This whole discussion is not for the end user,” he said. “Technology should be ‘invisible.’ “
If HTC does that, Wang added, the end user should simply experience a degree of pleasure, an emotional satisfaction that their purchase was wise. And that, he said, would take HTC to the pinnacle of the smartphone segment it exclusively focuses on, a segment slowly moving in HTC’s direction.
