The curse of the cat (or, how do you design a device?)

What is the ‘curse of the cat’?

Sometimes when you’re working from home, you turn away from your computer long enough that the screen goes to sleep. Then your cat walks across the keyboard and wakes it back up, and maybe sends an email full of gibberish. Eventually the screen goes to sleep again (if the cat leaves).

This is a tremendous waste of power and computing resources (not to mention reputation).

The curse of the cat is also the curse of the power adapter. Do you leave your laptop plugged in all day? Would you feel comfortable travelling away for a single night and not taking the power cord?

The cat and the power adapter conspire to ruin a business user’s day. But these are curses that can be lifted with good design. With better design. Maybe the real question is, what does any of this have to do with designing devices?

Essentially, though customer feedback is always welcome (and is something we do formally with our Customer Advisory Councils) it's much harder to solve a product problem once you’ve released it and it’s in the customer’s hands. That’s why we spend so much time designing and exploring and learning and deciding on the right end user experience. We have to get it right before it gets to you.

A human presence detector

We’re looking at designing devices that can move readily between office and home. That means we're interested in quantum leaps in battery life and performance. True, those things are often at odds with each other - one negatively impacts the other. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s about optimizing hardware and software resources.

That’s how we come back to the cat.

How quickly can the PC dim the screen or take it down to a low power mode, then boot back up when it detects you, using the least amount of resources? Then it recognizes you, by the way, not just another person like your kids or a colleague - or your cat wandering across your keyboard – and logs you back into your desktop.

One way to do that is to use the camera and a system called a ‘human presence detector’ in combination with software called Glance by Mirametrix. You’ll need a low power camera, of course, since cameras are usually pretty power hungry. The camera sees you and brings the screen back. Simple, right? A little bit of heartbeat in the camera that can recognize Jerry and act accordingly.

And here’s the thing: if I can do it in a smart way, I don't need to add an extra battery or the weight that goes along with it. I can optimize the battery usage and performance with AI instead. In the future, leveraging the power of AI, the camera will be able to detect who is approaching, turn the system on and login to their personal resources. Very handy in a shared PC environment, or at home with multiple users. Since we are all spending more and more hours in front of our PCs, we can take that a step further by detecting posture or levels of fatigue and alert the user accordingly, in a similar way to automobiles now can do.

Doubling down on the camera

But since we’re talking about cameras, right now our end users are saying, you’ve got to give me a good camera because it’s my lifeline now.

Actually, it’s more like: I want a fantastic camera that makes my face look good, that can be adjusted with a good lighting setup, that I can move around my house wherever I need it without worrying about battery. We are working on AI technology and real-time processing to do just this. We all want to look our best on conference calls!

We know some people work from kitchen tables, beds, armchairs, patios, coffee shops, hot desks, hotel rooms. Systems have to be able to move. So now we’re designing for more megapixels, or better low-light capability, or an inbuilt lighting system, or all three. We’re designing for portability. We’re designing for battery and performance.

And of course, these days with laptop designs, we’re looking to eliminate or minimize the bezel for a sleeker look. Unfortunately, this also eliminates or minimizes the space where the camera can ordinarily sit. But the bigger the camera the better the images and locating at the top of the display is the best position.

Well, maybe we can redesign the camera to fit in a long skinny space. Or to sit behind a screen, so I can’t see it, but it can see me. But if I’m gesturing at the screen in a video conference, will it lose part of me, where the camera dead spot is? And what about people who don’t want the camera, who put stickers over their cameras (or use our camera shutters)?

Many people ask me why we can’t have huge megapixel cameras like in smartphones. Technically it is possible, but today the compromises outweigh the benefits. The top cover thickness on laptops is a lot thinner than smartphones, and those cameras also protrude in most cases from the smartphone chassis. We would have to add several millimeters to the thickness of the top cover, adding weight.

Investing in real sustainability

As you can tell, we do a lot of testing with users to determine and discover what they feel is important. It’s not all cameras and batteries. What we find is that with Gen Z and Millennials, there’s an ever-increasing desire for sustainability and being kind to the environment.

We're bringing that idea into the design process. It adds expense. The materials change. The difference between aluminum and recycled aluminum is substantial. Once metal has been worked, its characteristics change. And when you have to be able to produce a design reliably across millions of units, if the yield of a metal changes by a few percentage points, it can really cause the price to go up.

If you think about that, that’s kind of counter to the whole sustainability argument! Because now I've got parts that I'm wasting, and it took more money and energy to recycle them ready for use. How do you do that responsibly, without a tremendous amount of scrap? We’re still learning and experimenting.

Learning about learning

I recently visited the Lenovo design center to talk about our new teacher and student device designs. We’ve learned a lot from teachers, students and parents over the last 12 months of learning from home, and all of it has impacts on how we design devices for them.

Here’s some examples that revolve solely around keyboards. Kids have a mysterious expertise when it comes to finding things on the PC that can move, like keys, and popping them off. They spill things. If we include a magnetized pen, it can become a fidget spinner, or get lost, or its housing might get something else jammed in it which cracks the screen once it’s snapped closed.

We’re proud of our tactile Lenovo keyboards. We want to get the design right for every user.

We actually have a ‘Chris test’ for keyboards. It’s subjective. I won’t approve any change to our keyboards unless my colleague Chris Osborne also approves. That’s because Chris understands the feel of our keyboards. We have sensors to test the pressure, the millimeter of travel on the keyboard, the shape. But it really comes down to the feel of the keyboard. Only a human can understand the human aspects of an experience.

(It drives my engineering team crazy. They can test it with machines. They’re sure they can't tell any difference! Then you bring the human expert in and he goes, nope, just not right. It drives me crazy, too. But you’ve got to get it right.)

Design, sustainability, profitability, functionality

It's tough to tell an engineer that we need to find a better way. That the existing answer can't be the answer even if it’s currently the only answer.

It means we have to go back to the drawing board and when we do, there’s always a battle brewing, and these days, it’s hard to meet in person to properly assess the decisions we’re making. Right now, my teams meet once or twice a week with all possible safety considerations in place.

So how do we design a product, in the end? How do we get past the massive arguments?

We pull up real customer data and go back to what they want. The data comes from our Customer Advisory Councils (currently virtual), from the Chris test, from tens of thousands of customer data points gathered from feedback, purchase decisions, surveys and research.

The curse of the cat, the power adaptor, the fidgety kid, the recycled metal, the low-power high-performance camera. These are curses we all simply live with. But with good design, we can and will get it right before it gets to you, and dispel curses you didn’t even realize were haunting you.