Back to the Basics Approach Yields Revolutionary Design
Motorola’s government and public safety design team bucked conventional wisdom to design a revolutionary and award- winning new two-way radio.
Sticking with the status quo is safe, and that is why companies are often reluctant to branch out into the unfamiliar. But Motorola knows that thinking out of the box is how great companies develop great products. And that is the reason Motorola’s APX™ 7000 portable multiband two-way radio was recently recognized for its design excellence with a coveted iF product design award.
The award validates the literally hundreds of thousands of hours that went into designing the new APX radio. This product revolutionizes the design of the two-way radio, which Motorola pioneered more than 75 years ago, by incorporating technology that is so easy to use that operating it is “second nature” to first responders out in the field.
To create the APX radio and all of Motorola’s public safety products, Motorola’s government and public safety design team uses a number of research techniques borrowed from the fields of anthropology and psychology. For instance, one part of the design process involves having users explore their feelings about a product using creative methods such as developing collages. Or users are asked to actually “build” products using a technique called “Velcro® modeling,” which gives researchers insight into what features users find important.
One of the key things that the team discovered in its research was that users thought three elements were critically important in their radios: the push-to-talk (PTT) button, the speaker and the volume control. And public safety users wanted those controls to be easy to use and located in a prominent place.
But here was the problem: They also wanted more functionality in their radios – like the ability to access data applications such as looking at mug shots while patrolling. And they wanted the radios to be smaller.
Designing a Better Radio Required Out-of-the-Box Thinking
“If you went down the linear way of thinking, you would think that you couldn’t put all of these features in the device,” says Bruce Claxton, senior director of design integration at Motorola.
But the public safety design team at Motorola is used to thinking non-linearly, and they soon came up with a solution: Put the “mission-critical” voice capabilities on one side of the radio, making them easy to find and operate, and the data capabilities on the other side. That way in an emergency, users could easily revert back to the “simple” voice communications controls that they knew very well.
Motorola designed the voice side using a “kitchen triangle” concept. The idea here is that in a well-designed kitchen, the three things you use the most – the sink, the stove and the refrigerator – should be placed in an easy-to-access triangle. Similarly, in the APX radios, Motorola made sure that the PTT, the volume button and the speaker were all easy to locate and use. For instance, Motorola tilted the volume button, making it stick out for easy access. And Motorola made sure the PTT functionality worked no matter where you pushed the PTT button.
In fact, designers were able to make the PTT, the speaker and the volume control larger than they had ever been before while making the radio smaller and still “grippable.” How? They accomplished this by introducing a T-shape form factor for the device, where the top portion of the radio – which contains the audio controls – is larger than the rest of the radio.
And the design team gives senior management kudos for its willingness to agree to both the different form factor and the two-sided design. “It was a risk to put this design out there when the competitors were sticking to the status quo,” said Scott Richards, a senior staff industrial designer at Motorola. “The senior management agreed that we needed to approach the product differently.”
Overcoming the Challenges
Motorola knew it had a winning design idea for the APX, but the hard work was not over yet. When the design team started conducting usability tests, it realized it had a problem. In the usability tests, when public safety users pulled the radios out of their holsters and started using them, Motorola researchers noticed that the public safety officials often tried to talk into the data side of the product.
That was a problem, because Motorola had only planned to put one speaker and one microphone into the device – only on the audio side, notes Mark Palmer, senior design integration manager of Human Factors Design Research and User Interface Design at Motorola.
Little did the design team realize that this “problem” would soon turn out to be a big benefit. Because once engineers figured out how to cost-effectively include two microphones and two speakers in the device, they realized that they could also improve the audio quality of the device significantly using advanced noise cancellation techniques that are not possible with just one microphone and speaker.
“We went out on New York’s 5th Avenue at noon to do a demo, and the noise on the street was almost deafening,” says Claxton, “when we used the new APX radio, the sound was crystal clear. There was no background noise at all.”
The device’s design is improved in many other ways as well. For instance, the radio has a display that lets users see the channel the radio is using without taking the device off their belts. Plus, Motorola has designed a special holster that allows users to see the data display – which may eventually, for instance, show a mug shot of a suspect or a license plate number – without removing the radio from the holster.
These innovative features are just some of the reasons Motorola received the prestigious iF product design award. But the public safety design team still knows its greatest reward comes from enhancing the safety of first responders and the citizens they protect. “First responders have an emotional connection to their two-way radios,” Palmer says. “Many public safety officials have told us that they would rather give up their gun than their radio, because they know their radio keeps them safer.”
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