Horace Luke is chief innovation officer at HTC, the Taiwan-based maker of smartphones that is gathering more fans with the release of each new phone. Since joining HTC in 2007, Luke has overseen its transformation from a manufacturer of other handset companies' designs to a recognized global brand. His first effort at HTC, the Touch Diamond smartphone, came out in July 2008. Since then Luke has overseen the design and release of some 20 different phones.
Phone design takes an understanding of radio and computer engineering, industrial design and consumer behavior. Luke came to HTC from
Forbes: What are you working on now?
Luke: We're on a mission to change the world with connectivity and computing power. What we deliver now is 10% to 20% of what we want. Right now we're thinking a lot about content acquisition: How will you acquire information from the cloud, how will you archive things there, and how will you fetch them when you want them? What if you were sitting anywhere in the world, and you wanted to show someone a picture of your kid from a year ago? How could you easily find that and call it up from your online photo library?
Obviously, there is a lot of work to do on the network, but to make that work for consumers you have to bring hardware and software together in great design. You need to find ways for people to discover you and see what you can do.
Hardware is what attracts them--it's the first date. Software, the usability, is how they fall in love. So you need to think about an experience that begins with packaging, how it feels to open the box, turn on the phone, what comes up on the screen, and it continues all the way to discovering advanced features and programming things into it.
I tell my teams to measure a storytelling of 10s. In the first 10 seconds they have the phone, do they understand what they are getting? Then the first 10 minutes: Is it easy to engage with the product, do a simple task? At 10 days, are they frustrated with the product or telling their friends about it? What are they starting to discover? At 10 weeks, what are the powerful features they didn't use before? Are they putting folders and widgets for their own stuff in the phone? At 10 months, they may be ready for a change. Did your brand fulfill its promise, so they stay with you?
Who influenced you?
I grew up in Mercer Island, Wash., and thanks to a graphics and design teacher in high school, I was selling jewelry at local galleries while I was still there. I studied accounting, commercial architecture and sculpture before I came to industrial design.
In my first job I designed models for trade shows--overnight you build something that looks like a cabin, or a college campus, on the floor of a hall in Vegas--and got interested in how spaces tell stories. Later I worked at Nike, in a group that does brand control--I learned how multidisciplinary design has to be. Everything from a sneaker eyelet to a brochure to a trade exhibition is part of touching the customer with the brand.
I didn't know anything about technology, but I got Microsoft to take a chance on me, and started by designing the underside of an optical mouse. I worked on Xbox to communicate the idea of the ultimate technology in a living room. Eventually I got interested in mobile. I went into the research group and became a complete nerd in software.
How has new technology changed you, if at all?
The industry is fighting for consumers. We have to work on radio frequency integration for fewer dropped calls--that's part of the experience, the design. When I did the Touch Diamond, I brought in teams in hardware, software, radio, packaging. We were closed off from the rest of the building--collaborating, eating dinner together. It went back to Nike, in some ways, different people working together, with an idea of end-to-end control over the final experience. I listen well to my people, and try to give them a dream--that is the trick in innovation.
Still, a lot of the time I go with my gut. My feeling is, kill an idea quickly if you don't feel it. If you do feel it, take the idea out into the company, socialize it for them. One time I met with one engineer for two days, just developing his idea. I can't talk about what it was, but I felt it.
What is overhyped?
I am a little tired of hearing about how there are 500,000 apps in
In an era of quick knockoffs, is the value of originality diminished?
We don't stare at other people's devices, what they have done. Obviously we have to know what is on the market. But we stare at our customers and what they do all day. What can we give them? I have "magical groups" inside HTC--engineers and designers working on contexts, things like mobility, but also behavior inside cars, or at a meeting. If the phone rings loud at a meeting and you pick it up fast, could the sensors inside the phone spot that, and turn down the tone of the ring? That design might show you are respecting the meeting, but keeping the phone useful.
To read more of Quentin Hardy's stories, click here. Contact the writer at qhardy@forbes.com.
See Also:
John Kolko On Design That Changes Human Behavior
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Yves Behar On Redefining Design
