A NICE design story
Calls. Messages. Camera. Maps. Music. Games. Internet. Payment. School. Work.
How did one object end up doing all of this?
Before the smartphone, before the mobile phone, before the telephone:
The situation was different. The need was the same.
People used visible or audible signals across distance:
fire and smoke
flags and semaphore
bells, horns, and drums
A signal could travel farther than a voice, but the message was limited.
A cup-and-string phone is not the ancestor of the cellphone.
It is a simple model of the problem:
How can sound move from one person to another?
Sound vibrates the cup. The string carries the vibration. The second cup turns it back into sound.
Useful idea, serious limitation: you are still connected by a line.
Electricity made it possible to send a signal quickly through a wire.
New capability: long-distance messages could arrive much faster.
Limitation: the signal had to be encoded and decoded.
Design changed because the available technology changed.
The telephone changed the question:
People could speak naturally over long distances.
But the phone was tied to a place.
Radio changed another part of the situation:
Radio allowed communication while moving and where wires were impractical.
The trade-offs included equipment size, power, range, interference, and cost.
Military, emergency, aviation, marine, and industrial communication pushed radio toward portable systems.
Some early portable systems were backpack-sized.
They proved something important:
Wireless voice communication could move with the user.
But portable did not yet mean pocket-sized.
A designer does not only ask, “What exists in phones?”
They also ask:
Telephone networks were good at connecting one person to another.
Radio was good at communication without a fixed wire.
Mobile telephone
The first useful mobile phones solved the biggest need:
Make a call while away from a landline.
But evaluation found obvious problems:
So the NICE cycle continued.
The question changed from:
Can a telephone be mobile?
To:
Can I comfortably carry it everywhere?
Nokia-era phones became smaller, tougher, simpler, and better at lasting through the day.
Voice was no longer enough.
Text messages and email changed what people wanted from a phone.
BlackBerry-style devices used a full physical keyboard because typing had become important.
A physical keyboard made typing easier.
But it also created a new limitation:
Even when you are looking at a photo, map, video, game, or webpage.
Evaluation creates the next design question.
A touchscreen lets the same surface change jobs.
It can become:
keyboard | map | camera controls | game controls | browser | video
The phone is no longer only a telephone.
It becomes a small general-purpose computer.
Instead of deciding every future function when the phone is built, software can add new functions later.
The user may discover needs they could not have asked for before the technology existed.
One device begins replacing many separate objects:
phone
camera
music player
GPS
calculator
calendar
flashlight
web browser
The design becomes a platform.
Today, some phone functions move onto other devices:
smartwatch
earbuds
car displays
wearable sensors
The situation changes again: sometimes the best screen is the one you do not need to take out of your pocket.
It was many cycles of:
Changing needs. New research. New materials. New technologies. New prototypes. New feedback.
Then another cycle.
What must it do? What would make it better?
What can we learn from users, existing designs, experiments, and other fields?
What is the smallest useful version we can make and show?
Did it work? Are the requirements still right? Did the situation change?
The goal is not to predict the perfect final product.
The goal is to make the next decision better than the last one.