Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff Page B
Authors: Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff
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thicket of coding and header information. Because the Leapfrog screen was so small, all unnecessary information was pared from the display. All that users would see when an e-mail arrived was who sent it, when it arrived, the subject line, and the first two lines of text. Lazaridis didn’t want a help menu—the device should never be that complicated. He believed that using the Leapfrog for e-mail should be so instinctive that users would never have to interrupt their train of thought to hunt for a command. “We found 90 percent of the time you did the same thing,” says Lazaridis. “So at any one point, there’s a high probability you’ll do the same thing. For each one, we tried to anticipate what the user would do next. If we got it right, everything became a double click [of the trackwheel]: one click to pull up the command, one click to execute.”
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.
The thirty-minute ferry ride from San Francisco to Sausalito is one of the world’s more beautiful commutes. Passengers float by the Golden Gate Bridge and tree-topped Berkeley Hills as they make their way to the pastel-colored shops and restaurants of Sausalito. In the spring of 1998 a few dozen professional commuters arriving in Sausalito for some downtime were greeted with unwelcome work questions.
Stationed at the wharf was a trio of employees from Lexicon Branding, a local company renowned for its gift of selecting memorable brand names, particularly for nerdy high-tech products. Intel’s Pentium chip and Apple’s PowerBook laptop brand names were born in Lexicon’s Sausalito headquarters. On this day, Lexicon’s staff was assigned to test commuter attitudes about mobile devices. When the questions turned to e-mails, the results surprised them. E-mail wasn’t a convenience; it was a stress point. Mentioning the word inspired dread about work piling up in in-boxes.
This was a new insight for Lexicon’s client, RIM, which was searching for a name for the mobile e-mail device it was to launch in 1999. Lazaridis’s engineers loved PocketLink, the name RIM was using internally. Other choices included EasyMail and MegaMail. 2 It was clear now to
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.
The thirty-minute ferry ride from San Francisco to Sausalito is one of the world’s more beautiful commutes. Passengers float by the Golden Gate Bridge and tree-topped Berkeley Hills as they make their way to the pastel-colored shops and restaurants of Sausalito. In the spring of 1998 a few dozen professional commuters arriving in Sausalito for some downtime were greeted with unwelcome work questions.
Stationed at the wharf was a trio of employees from Lexicon Branding, a local company renowned for its gift of selecting memorable brand names, particularly for nerdy high-tech products. Intel’s Pentium chip and Apple’s PowerBook laptop brand names were born in Lexicon’s Sausalito headquarters. On this day, Lexicon’s staff was assigned to test commuter attitudes about mobile devices. When the questions turned to e-mails, the results surprised them. E-mail wasn’t a convenience; it was a stress point. Mentioning the word inspired dread about work piling up in in-boxes.
This was a new insight for Lexicon’s client, RIM, which was searching for a name for the mobile e-mail device it was to launch in 1999. Lazaridis’s engineers loved PocketLink, the name RIM was using internally. Other choices included EasyMail and MegaMail. 2 It was clear now to
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