Palm and its legion of PDAces, Treonauts and WiFirebrands celebrate 10 years of the Zen of Palm. But, what the hell is this Zen that everyone talks about?
I decided to go to the one man universally blamed…uh, credited with popularizing that phrase, and making it ubiquitous with Palm: Rob Haitani, designer par-excellence. Since joining the ‘original’ Palm in 1993, Rob has been directly involved in the initial and ongoing design of the Palm UI, for both PDAs and Treos. As always, Rob was courteous enough to make time for the Palm user-community:
The short answer is that “Zen of Palm” is a set of user interface design principles that focus on simplifying, optimizing and solving problems.
Zen of Palm began as a joke, really. First I should clarify that I did not actually coin the term. It was originally used by early Palm enthusiasts to describe the surprising absence of frustration you feel from using the PalmPilot. The UI was so plain and humble looking yet paradoxically faster and easier to use.
Rather than simply talking about the principles, let me tell you the story of how I co-opted the term. One night I was working on a presentation to articulate our design philosophies to internal Palm employees. I was looking for a theme for my slides that would articulate what was behind what people called “Zen of Palm,” and I thought that riffing on that theme would be a fun tongue-in-cheek way to do it. I remembered that Zen teachers sometimes ask paradoxical riddles to teach their principles, so I decided to come up with three riddles that you would need to solve in order to find the “path to enlightened design.” I looked to the internet for inspiration, and found one that asked “How do you put a catfish in a gourd?” That resonated with me because we were constantly struggling with how to fit powerful functionality into small screens with limited memory, etc. So I changed the catfish riddle to, “How do you put a mountain into a teacup?” That sounded cool, but I guess I needed an answer. Well I knew what the wrong answer was. Competitive products typically assumed more was better, and tried to cram in as many features as possible. So the first thing that popped into my mind was, “why would you want to fit a mountain into a teacup?” Our approach, on the other hand, was to really focus on the most important things you wanted to do, and aggressively remove the rest. (Less is more.) So there was the answer to my riddle: “Dig for the diamond and put that in the teacup. Why would you want all the dirt and rocks?” That was the heart of the original presentation.
If you want more details I think PalmSource has a later version of that preso on their website (although there were a lot of changes made). Also it is covered in a book called “Information Appliances and Beyond” by Eric Bergman, which goes into the nuts and bolts of the design principles a little more.
The answer to this is deeply intertwined with the fate of Zen of Palm. The original “Zen” basically said you built great products by removing functionality. This unfortunately was not a very scalable approach because it did not address how you deal with the complexities of convergence, specifically internet-enabled smartphones. The first few generations of Treo products combined everything in a PalmPilot with a phone, email, messaging, web and media software. Yikes. Old school Zen no longer applied (in fact we don’t use the term internally any more). We focused most of our attention on trying to develop overall interface principles for text entry and navigation, since phone usage patterns typically relied more on pressing buttons than using a stylus. It has been challenging just trying to get each individual app to work well in the context of a new platform. New school Zen meant applying the principles of simplification to a complex product, i.e., that simplification is a means rather than an end. The end still needs to be optimizing to solve problems. But the capabilities of the product were expanding so quickly that the Zen principles were strained to the limit. In addition, convergence meant that we now had two sets of customers with very different expectations about user interface (“mental models.”) People more comfortable with Palm OS products expect basic functions to work differently than people who are more comfortable with phones. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Finally, the different carrier partners we work with have their own sets of feature requirements that need to be merged into the products as well.
Moving forward, we are seeing patterns of how real people use Treo products, and there have been advances in the underlying processing and network speed. As a result, we have insight into the new set of core problems to solve, and more tools to solve them. You implied in your question that not controlling Garnet or WinMobile could be a challenge. Yes and no. I have come to see a pattern of being able to use high-level interface integration to mask the complexities of underlying applications. This is a fancy way of saying that I think there are ways for us to hide more UI moving forward. For example, the address book started as an independent application with its own button you pressed to access it, and categories to organize and navigate through your contacts. Over the generations of Treo products it has become more and more embedded. Now you can access your contacts through the phone app just by typing. Categories are less important because it’s actually more efficient to look up a name by typing a few letters than it is to navigate through folders. Over time I think the address book will become more of a source of data accessed by any app, i.e., “disappear” as an application from the customer’s perspective (regardless of whether it still is a separate app under the covers). I think there are analogous design opportunities in other applications that will allow us to hide more of the underlying complexities. In other words I am hopeful that we will see a triumphant resurgence of “Neo Zen” in upcoming generations of products :^)