Download The Simplicity Shift

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Jenson
July 23, 2002
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Design Break:
The GPRS
Study
Months of programming effort can save you days of critical
thinking.
—Unknown
T
he purpose of these Design Breaks is to give you some real-life
examples and exercises to clarify the points discussed in this book.
I find the problem with examples is the most meaty and insightful ones
are viciously complex and need far too much background to be practical.
I hope I found a middle ground, showing products of enough depth that
aren’t overwhelming in detail.
This first example is more of a sad story than a design exercise, but
it’s, unfortunately, typical of how early strategic planning can fail. If the
strategy is wrong, getting a well-designed product is nearly impossible.
Subsequent Design Breaks will be more hands-on – taking an existing
product and reworking it using the tools in the book.
THE PROBLEM
At one company where I worked, my team was putting together a design for a GPRS phone. GPRS, like most of the technologies in the
mobile phone industry, is a richly technical function that almost seems
to create more problems for the user than the solutions it offers. In principle, GPRS is supposed to allow high-speed data access to the phone,
so you can browse the Web at much higher speeds than before. Not
only that, but you can always be online instead of the old-fashioned