| PC Interface for a Handheld DeviceHP’s Calypso would have been an all-in-one organizer, MP3 and game player targeted at students in their mid to late teens. I say “would have been” because HP pulled the plug on this entire division a few months after we finished our work. While another Cooper team worked on the interface for the device itself, I worked on the design of the PC interface, the analog to the PalmPilot’s Palm Desktop. (In 2001, anyway.)
We first focused on the most common use — MP3- and game-swapping usage scenarios — and decided that the application had to do a couple of things really well: (1) eliminate the need to navigate the Windows file hierarchy to find music and games, and (2) facilitate device memory management.
One clear shortcoming of Palm Desktop (again, in 2001) was that it forced users to put all of Palm-related applications in one place. Most kids that I interviewed had a more cavalier way of managing their MP3s. They let files pile up all over the place — on the desktop, in various P2P app shared folders — so, we designed an application that supports put-it-wherever-you-want behavior by bringing all .mp3s into an central index. We wanted our persona, Russ, to be able to tell the application: “Show me MP3s that I’ve got in the last week,” and see a nicely sorted list of MP3s that he has downloaded from file-sharing apps, received as email attachments, or ripped from CDs.
Minimal device memory represented a major design constraint; the device was billed as an MP3 player, yet it offered a mere 16MB of memory. So, it was an MP3 player for 2 or 3 MP3s at a time. On the PC side, minimal device memory made it even more important to reveal file size when our persona Russ wanted to upload a song or game; hence the rendering of the device, and the visual representation of file size. We wanted Russ to be able to say: “Okay, if I want to put this song on, I need to take these two off” without doing any math.
Every Cooper project is a collaborative effort. To learn more, about Cooper projects and design methodology, check out “How Cooper works.” I collaborated in the ideation and iteration of this design with Cooper designers David Fore and Jeff Carino. Jeff and I developed the design concepts; David helped make them cohesive; Jeff did the artwork for the deliverable; I wrote it, laid it out, and presented it in a condensed PPT.
