By Susan Twombly, August 2006
When you climb into a rental car, you turn the key and go. It's intuitive: You know where the steering wheel and pedals are, even if you've never driven the car before. And that's exactly the "climb in and drive" familiarity that HP's VP of Design, Sam Lucente, and the team of designers and human factors engineers throughout the company are creating across HP products.
Whether using a printer in the den or a server in the data center, Lucente wants the customer experience to be familiar and simple. But for a company with thousands of products and designers, simplicity can be a bit, well, complex.
That's why, when he joined HP three years ago, Lucente made it his first order of business to unify the inventive culture at HP — integrating the ideas and efforts of previously isolated design teams.
This enabled both a creative and an organizational shift in the design process at HP. Design teams went from just focusing on specific products to focusing on how they can work better together to simplify the technology experience.
"That's really a new frontier in the tech industry," Lucente says. "We're not just innovating products here, we're innovating the overall experience customers have with our products," he explains. "Our goal is to create an ecosystem of well designed products that are simpler to use and immediately identifiable with HP's brand."
As an example, Lucente points to the HP Q Control, a standard menu control button that can be found now or in the near future on HP remote controls for TVs, digital cameras and printers for home and business.
Looking like a backward Q, this six-button interface is a big leap forward in providing customers with a common way to interact with a growing number of HP products.
Press an arrow to easily move through menus, or tap the "back" button at the tail of the Q to quickly back track. Watch for the Q Control as HP plans to replicate it across all new and refreshed products for a familiar, intuitive user experience.
Understanding just what that experience should be like takes a lot of research. To gather input for the Q Control, Lucente formed a cross-functional team from R&D, marketing and design to study the home entertainment habits of 28 families — by moving in with them, at least for part of the day.
What researchers found was that most families needed an easier, more obvious way to navigate through all the information spewing forth from their home entertainment devices — TVs, VCRs, phones, printers, etc. And the Q Control was born.
Beyond the home front, HP applies the same approach to understanding the customer experience in the business space. Based on customer feedback, designers incorporated color-coded cables and a consistent look and location for power switches found in HP server racks. A built-in display screen on the rack now lets IT staff quickly check system status without running back to a PC. Designers also created common ways to access and connect racked servers across product types.
Together, these new design elements make HP server racks easier to install, operate and service. Standard design features can also do much towards lowering customers' IT operating costs with "learn once, apply often" operation that cuts training time.
For Lucente, HP designers and human factors engineers, it's all about observing the customer experience and taking that knowledge back to the drawing board — an out-of-the-ivory-tower, into-the-trenches approach that helps HP's design teams fill in the gap between what people don't have and what they need.
"Bringing people to the table who are well educated in the ways of the customer is where good design begins," Lucente says.
Beyond delivering a simpler user experience, consistent design elements free designers from reinventing the wheel with every new product. To help designers continue to reuse — not rethink — elements, Lucente and Industrial Design Chief, John Guenther, created a library of standard design elements.
In the library, are the standard power switch and Q Control, along with the display screen used on the server rack. (Which, incidentally, is the same screen that makes displaying and printing photos on an HP photo printer so easy.)
From standard colors, finishes and materials to flanges and reusable software objects, designers can tap into this collection to share these universal design elements, freeing them to focus time on higher-level pursuits — like responding to customer needs.
What's next? Lucente is out to simplify how people organize their personal digital photos with what he calls an "ecosystem" approach — truly a case of the sum being greater than the parts.
"Again, it's not just about designing great kiosk, cameras or photo printers," Lucente says. "It's about designing an ecosystem of products that work together to create a great digital photography experience for our customers."
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