Always Have a Back-up Solution
“Many of the things we design are not going to work the way we thought they would at first. There are just too many unknowns until we try it. In anticipation of this, great designers always have a back-up solution brewing in the back of their mind. When things don’t work out as planned those back-up solutions have already been thought about and can quickly come to the rescue of a previously failed attempt. Most often, these back-up solutions are small changes to the design that improve the chances of desirable functionality, not radical changes that are also unlikely to work on the first try.[1]”
One of the great designers I had the opportunity to work with was Peter Skillman. Peter is currently the director of design for Outlook at Microsoft. Before this he was the director of design at Nokia for mobile devices, director of user experience at Palm, and an IDEO engineer. If you’ve seen the IDEO shopping cart video, you’ve seen Peter. He was the project lead in that video.
In 1999, while Peter was at IDEO, he taught me that great designers always have a back-up solution. He and I were working on a handheld computer and its docking station. At the time, there were a few different ways that handheld computers physically connected to docking stations. The most common method was an engagement latch – the kind where the computer snap-locks into a docking station, and is removed by pressing a mechanical ejection lever/button of sorts. Engagement latches provide a reliable mechanical and electrical connection, but have a poor user experience. For the project we were working on, we needed a better user experience than this. We needed users to simply pick the handheld computer off the docking station and walk away.
During the design process, we toyed with the concept of just using gravity to hold the computer and the dock together. A competitive product by Phillips was doing this, and the user experience of pulling the computer off the dock was great, but the electrical connection reliability was poor, ultimately causing users to complain about the docking station. Although we thought we could do better than Phillips, we chose not to rely on gravity alone, doing so would have put “computer-weight-reduction”, and “connection-reliability” in conflict. In other words, relying only on gravity to make the connection would have caused any computer weight reduction to worsen the electrical connection between the computer and the docking station. Thus the challenge facing Peter and me; design a connection that feels like its reliant only on gravity, but actually has an engagement lock.
Our main concept was to have two relatively small (and rigid) fingers that would protrude from the dock and slide into the bottom of the handheld computer and hook onto it with the fingers. These fingers would not only align the computer side-to-side to ensure proper electrical contact alignment, but provide a slight mating force that would hold the computer and the dock together thus producing a reliable mechanical and electrical connection.
Our initial prototypes showed that the fingers worked well at holding the computer and the dock together, and the user experience was excellent. Well, to be truthful, the user experience was great for all reasonable users. There was one particular user (one of the clients) that made it his job to do everything possible to break the fingers off the docking station. And indeed under some extreme situations the fingers would break off. To put this into perspective, our tests showed it would take over 40 pounds of force to break them off. Even though there was a way to break the fingers, we all chose to cut pre-production tooling based on the finger concept. Typical tooling time is 8 weeks and it was during that time that Peter told me we needed a back-up solution. It was a true back-up solution; it was only there so that if the plug was pulled on the fingers, the back-up solution would be ready to go.
Peter called our particular back-up solution the bimpf. Everything in that industry has a code name. That was ours. The bimpf was a stubby protrusion on the primary cosmetic surface of the dock that slipped into a matching hole on the back of the handheld. One of the beauties of this back-up solution was that it was trivial to prototype; glue a piece of plastic to the dock and cut a hole on the back of the handheld. Instant and accurate bimpf. Because it was so easy to prototype, significant fine tuning could be done, which allowed us to arrive at a solution that felt as if it was reliant only on gravity, yet was held together by a mechanical latch created when the bimpf and the hole in the back of the handheld were mated.
So what happened to the bimpf, eventually? When the finger tooling (no-bimpf concept) was complete we put the pre-production units through significant testing. The result was that the finger design worked well, especially if you pulled it off the dock in the right way, at the right speed. The truth though, is that virtually no one pulls on things the right way. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the client, who made it his job to break all those fingers, was getting us ready for how the product would be treated by real users. Now you can guess what happened to the bimpf. It came to the rescue. And it did it quickly and efficiently without delaying the launch of the product.
Thanks Peter. I don’t design things now without having a back-up solution. It’s now just a normal part of how I think about design.
[1] This paragraph is taken from a Product Development book written by myself and Carl Sorensen. Specifically from Chapter 9: Seven ways to become a better designer.
