Brandon Schauer: When you arrived at Motorola, you heard a customer in a focus group remark that Motorola phones were, "like some Cadillac that nobody wants." Can you take us through some of the changes that have taken place between your arrival and Motorola evolving into what Yankee Group calls "a hip, slick, dynamic, rapidly moving consumer electronics company"?
Jim Wicks: I joined Motorola in 2001 to start up a small user interface and interaction design group. During my first year, I went on the road for several months, meeting with all of our global customers. While in the Philippines I was listening to a discussion group talking about Motorola products and the user interface and the design. One of the questions to the focus group was, "What kind of things do you think of when you see these Motorola phones?" The response was, "They look and feel like just an old Cadillac." Meanwhile, the competitor phones seemed like BMWs or Audis.
Now, whether I completely agree with that assessment or not is beside the point. However, I think when you wrap up the entire Motorola culture, the way we dealt with customers, the physical design that we were shipping, and where we were in terms of our user interface at that stage--I don't think it was an inaccurate comment.
So, between that time, five years ago, and now, a lot has happened in the company. We've had a change in our CEO. Our Chief Marketing Officer, Jeffrey Frost, has gained a foothold in the last five years. And Ron Gerriques came on here, a couple years back. Meanwhile, the culture of the company, what the company stands for, and how people behave has really changed. From my point of view, these cultural changes are a result of the new leadership driving home a requirement, a desire, and a reward system for people to behave differently than in the past.
These new behaviors and rewards encourage innovation and collaboration, driving the company to be first, not just to be in the game. The focus is now on leveraging new technologies instead of always inventing them, and partnering versus having to do it all ourselves.
We are a technology leader. However, a big change in mobile devices has been to move from being technology-driven to being technology-enabled. This means things are driven by consumers' needs, wants, and desires. Consumers don't say, "Hey, I want a (blank)." They don't talk about technology in terms of what they want to do. They talk about what their objective is or what their desired experience is.
I think there's been more evidence of these big changes in the last six months. I believe there has been more change in the last two-and-a-half years I've been here than in the first two-and-a-half years.
BS: You explain many of the changes as being cultural in nature. Have their also been changes in process? What else had to change to gain this new orientation for Motorola?
JW: We're still not as far along as we want to be, but we feel we're on the right path. There's no silver bullet. It's fantastic to get a handful of products out there that we really believe are setting the tone. People can see these products--the SLVR, the PEBL, the RAZR, the Q---products that are manifestations of changes in the company.
The product is the brand. You build brand in our industry through the product and the experience. Those manifestations are tangible evidence of that change. It shapes what people internally and externally think about the company.
So one change has been this evidence that we all can look at and say, "Hey! It's working. See? It works better that way." Rather than process changes, I would say it's the achievement of tangible milestones that makes people realize that they can to this, and it gives people the confidence that they can win. When you have that evidence out there, people start to adopt and internalize what leadership is saying about changing behavior.
There have also been changes in process. Organizational changes made people really focus on doing fewer things better, rather than trying to address everything in an average way. Process changes ensure greater quality in our products and enable a better kind of front-end planning process. Now we're giving ourselves more time and more structure around how we plan innovation.
BS: Can innovation be planned?
JW: You can plan for it in a way to enables you to innovate. To me, innovation comes from a lot of different things. It could come from something completely unstructured or something structured. It could come from massive focus on something you need to achieve in the market. As long you're planning the ability to have that focus, then you can plan innovation.
Crucial to planning innovation is planning to adapt behavior, process, and culture to enable that innovation. We're developing a way of planning products and experiences that really does enable us to innovate.
BS: You mentioned earlier that the RAZR was a manifestation of some of these changes at Motorola. The RAZR's been compared with the iPod as a company-changing kind of product. Can products really change companies?
JW: A product by itself can't change a company. But, a product and a success can change a company. A product can start the change and can make people feel a part of that change. In the case of RAZR, I think the product alone has allowed us to gain much more confidence in a lot of things that we're thinking.
However, you could also create a product that succeeds by accident and not realize it. You could make a mistake by not building on a successful product or not being able to repeat a success. There's a lot of things that can happen that show a product doesn't really change the culture of a company or change the company. But a product can really bring a lot to the table to enable other things to happen that really do mean the company is changing.
BS: Handsets are transforming into consumer electronics, increasingly packed with more and more features, sold across many cultures and markets, and Motorola itself ships about 70-plus models per year. Can design address these many complexities, both for organizations and for consumers?
JW: Yes, quite a bit. Consider the case when you produce massive variations of products for multiple regions because you haven't been able to find one or two variations that really hit the mark across the regions. That means you're managing many more SKUs in your supply chain. You're managing many more vendors and parts. You're bifurcating the vendor base, and the pricing that you get on components isn't as favorable. You might be making many more products, but you're sourcing a lower volume of each component and therefore driving up the price of the components.
When you identify and develop a successful platform of products like SLVRs and RAZRs, you're leveraging a handful of key components and capabilities in these devices across multiple markets and multiple products. Then you're able to drive massive volume in certain areas of your supply chain that you weren't able to before. This simplifies complexity, vendor management, and more.
In comparison, what happens if you don't design in a product that is relatively smart or easy in terms of its manufacture? What happens if the design of the product doesn't appeal to a core set of needs consumers have across a large population base? Then you really can't leverage that scale that you get out of something like a RAZR or a SLVR.
Brand management is another example of where design is addressing complexity. We launched RAZR with the intent of it becoming an icon--not that I'm saying it is. But you can use the 'halo effect' of that kind of a product. We put massive marketing investment into the RAZR, and then we evolved it as a platform. When we start to market SLVR, Q, and PEBL, we leverage the halo that was created from the design language of the RAZR. We'll do the same in 2007 with our next kind of evolution, what we call the SCPL platform.
BS: Is the design language and iconic status of some products trumping plain functionality in the marketplace?
JW: The intention isn't to trump functionality. Our products are highly functional. If you look at PBL, RAZR, and the SLVR, they have MP3 players and cameras on them. But, compare them to other products that are driving a value proposition around specifications like a 58 Megapixel camera and 5800 songs. What we're doing with RAZR and PEBL is appealing to something that we think is really important in the market that we sense a groundswell in. People's real desire is to have something a little simpler. Things that support the core use cases that they care about, like community building, messaging, basic capturing and sharing of images, simple browsing, and obviously voice communications.
If you look at what most people are doing with their devices and what they say they care about most, you would offer functionality that addresses those primary uses really well. Plus you would create something that 'meets their style,' something that they see as an object of personal expression that they feel very good about, proud about, and comfortable with carrying around.
I think of it more as a balancing rather than a trumping of functionality. But, it also depends the category of the market or the segment of the market you're focusing on. Take the Q product for example. We think it's a really nice balance of something that's very stylish and very slim, but it's also fully functioning. It has a Microsoft OS and firewall connectivity for email, calendar, and more. It's really about a balancing, and we sensed and we still believe that there's a groundswell of consumers saying, "Nail the basics, and then give me something that really expresses me."
BS: Balance is an interesting term, because it implies that you have to choose how much to sacrifice on one end to achieve the goals at the other. For example, does stylish iconic design sacrifice some other aspects of customer experience?
JW: It's like when someone says, "Are you going to invest in design or usability?" I'm respond with, "Well, that's the same thing." Design is always about synthesis--synthesis of market needs, technology trends, and business needs.
So, I don't see the customer experience as a vast amount of things. It's about how you feel about your device; it's about the physical piece; it's about the software in your fist; it's about the connectivity to services. These things make up the whole experience, and the desirability of the physical device is a big piece of that. We found that an operator--meaning a wireless company--can drive more people to the new devices it offers because of the new services on these devices. But people start by immediately liking what they see, and then they start to grow into the new services and realize all these other aspects of the experience.
BS: I've read about an intriguing design guideline at Motorola that requires making it easy for customers to identify the handset model from a distance of three meters. Can you tell me a little bit about where this guideline came from, and the thinking behind it?
JW: It's a little different than how you quoted it. It's less about recognizing the product name. It's more about you identifying from three meters that the device is a Motorola product. So you'll see the Motorola identity, but you wouldn't notice the model name.
Historically, Motorola was all over the map in terms of form factors, silhouettes of the product, detailing of the products, and consistency of look. As a result, our brand really had no focus. Customers didn't have any idea what kind of handset we were going come at them with.
When operators were trying to build their own brand, they didn't know what to associate Motorola with, in terms of what its brand is about. If they don't know what we're bringing to the table, how would they know that we're the right people to deeply partner with to develop their own brand?
So we established a pragmatic and basic approach for the near term. We consolidated all of these variables into two general design languages that would exist at any point in time in the market. We started with the language of the RAZR and the PEBL. We began aggressively with these because at that time you could look at a profile like of a RAZR, or look at some basic character lines of a RAZR, and you would immediately associate it with Motorola.
The same was true with PEBL. If you look at that extremely simply silhouette that you see in the PEBL, you would immediately associate it with Motorola now, versus our competitors. If you just took silhouettes of all their products, you would see that it's never similar to the PEBL. It's never a simple, totally symmetrical oval shape.
The intent was to first start with silhouette and then get deeper into the character, attributes, and lines of the device. The result is that at three meters you see it, and it stands as Motorola. If it's this simple, symmetrical, geometric form of an oval-like PEBL, you see it.
You start at a few meters away and as you get closer you just build and reinforce what you think, see, and feel the closer you get. You can see the anodized aluminum and the magnesium in the keypad that is our signature. You can feel the signature soft touch that we use in all these products. Then you get into the screen. You see the way the user interface works, and then you start to see how it directly connects to Yahoo! or Google. You see how it plays music.
BS: Within Motorola, what is the perception of the business value that design provides?
JW: The design group includes the disciplines of advanced mechanical, user interface, industrial design, research, material sciences, and more. In the past, this group was integrated with a lot of our businesses, and it was about inventing things. They invented the cell phones and more. But, it was still very much a straight industrial design show, so to speak.
Within the last two years, the roles and disciplines of this group evolved from where we were to the point that it's probably one of the most diverse, multi-disciplinary corporate design groups all under one roof.
We have this diversity, we behave differently, and we design differently now versus three years ago. We don't think of design as a group out in an ivory tower that conceptualizes things and then figures out how to make them. Nor is it, "We've got a strategy, and we're going throw the technologists at it, and then we're going try to wrap it up and make it look good."
As much as people know that either of these approaches aren't the right ways to do it, I still think a majority of design groups end up being that way. What really defines our design group's positioning now versus three years ago is that it's really tightly woven into the way we plan our products, the strategies, the marketing, and how we prioritize what technologies we go after. To me, that is a huge difference. A big part of setting strategies is what we're doing in design, what the products are going to look like, the primary use cases we're going to achieve, and what experiences are going be. It's really the most tangible example of your strategy you can find.
We're integrating design seamlessly within the context of our portfolio planning, technology planning, and overall business strategy. This is something we didn't do three years ago. Then, we were outside of that whole process. Now, we're completely integrated into it, and we participate so that we can give expert input to it. We also get great input from it to inform what we have to do in terms of design.
To me, that is the big difference. Design is really woven into the fabric of how we plan what we're doing in our businesses now.
BS: What else has allowed Motorola to successfully make use of design?
JW: Experiences are much more broad that what we've been discussing. It's more than just the physical aspects of the product design.
One of the advantages of our design group is being a part of a greater organization that has the people who plan our marketing strategies for the key categories of our business. These people are a part of Richard Chin's staff, who is my boss and the director of our create-and-share category, our self-expression category, music category, entertainment category, productivity category, everyday communication category, and then also our consumer insights research group.
Within this larger global marketing group we have all the key people we need to be interfacing with in terms of planning what we want to do in the future. Being woven tightly together like this is a great advantage for us.
In the coming years, you'll continue to see leadership in industrial design and the physical side. But you'll really start to see the fruit of this way of working in the user interface and in connected and highly integrated services with a lot of the partners that we started to announce recently. That's why I think you really get into a much more holistic design and a holistic experience that I think we've focused on here.
Jim Wicks holds a BFA in industrial design from the University of Illinois and a graduate degree in design from Nihon University in Japan. Jim spent many years in Japan, first as a designer for GK Design associates and then with Sony Corporation. He later joined Sony's design group in the US with a focus on personal communications, computing and new audio products, culminating with his establishment of the Sony Innovation and Design Center in San Francisco. After spending one year with Sapient Corporation as Director of Strategy for their San Francisco office, Jim joined Motorola in 2001 as Director of User Interface Design and Human Factors and served in this role until he was appointed to his current role in 2004.
Brandon Schauer is a senior practitioner for Adaptive Path, a leading user experience company. He has nearly a decade of experience developing new products, services, and user experiences for the Web, handhelds, and more. Brandon received a Master of Design from the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, where he studied the planning, development, and management of innovation. Concurrently, he graduated with an MBA from the IIT Stuart School of Business.
