Palm
In a world before iPhones, all the jet-setters had a Palm Pilot. But this position let Palm get a tad complacent...and suddenly they found themselves behind the curve. I worked on a team that tried to help Palm catch up in terms of features and design, offering them concrete direction in areas such as controllers, color and typography.
Roles: Usability Researcher, Design Analyst, Writer
Roles: Usability Researcher, Design Analyst, Writer
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Who's using these things?
The first step was to interview users of various PDAs, to learn who they were, what features were indispensable, and what annoyed the heck out of them.
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Manipulating information
Palm had stuck resolutely to its two-way rocker. But the competition had moved on to four-way rockers, scroll-wheels, and more innovative buttons.
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Exploring color (in a black-and-white Palm world)
Palm was also late to the table in terms of using color. Our report dived deep into ways to effectively use color with information on a tiny screen.
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Improving legibility
We also looked at how higher-resolution screens could take advantage of more subtle elements of typography.
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Playtime!
After a trip to the gadget store (hey, we had to buy all this stuff ;).