Remove Think Points Until Invisible

“Lazaridis believed RIM’s new device was such a convenience that it would become the preferred mode for exchanging e-mails. For that to happen, the user interface on the Leapfrog—what the customer saw and experienced when using the device—had to be intuitive and easy to operate. “Remove think points,” was one of his favorite phrases. “I liked teaching people to put themselves in the minds of the users,” Lazaridis says. “I wanted to get to the point where users prefer to use [the device] to send messages than actually power their computers.””

“To Lazaridis, it was important that users only ever had one menu to choose from, rather than a multitude of options like most software programs. If you were typing a message and clicked the trackwheel, the menu would only bring up items that were relevant to crafting and sending an e-mail. It would also automatically highlight the Send function. The team developed other shortcuts, giving full functionality to thumb-typers without adding extra buttons. If a user typed two spaces, a period would appear at the end of the previous word and the next word would be automatically capitalized. If a user held down a letter key the machine would capitalize it, eliminating the need for the shift key. Ideas began to spill forth from across the company and got coded into the platform: if a user typed B while reading an e-mail, the e-mail would scroll to the bottom; T brought the user to the top, and U to the next unread message. To send a new e-mail, a user had to type only the first few letters of the recipient’s name in the To: box and all potential matches would show up until enough letters had been typed to eliminate all others. Clicking on a person’s name in a calendar item would bring up a new e-mail, with that person’s name already in the To: slot. Perhaps the neatest trick was making wireless e-mail appear faster and more instantaneous than it actually was. On other devices users had to log in, pull down messages, and wait for their device to process them. With RIM’s e-mail device messages arrived automatically, but the device still had to process them. That took time. Users didn’t need to know that. Lazaridis instructed his developers to hide the back-end process: users should be buzzed not when the e-mail arrived, but after it had been decrypted, decompressed, and dumped into their in-box, ready to read.”