Design process

It might sounds bizarre for a UX designer to talk about a concept phone. However this is one of those projects which I’m really proud of, for the reasons explained below. I was still studying Industrial Design at Università degli Studi di Palermo when me and a friend of mine (Giuseppe Avanzato) decided to do something extra. We were passionate (and still are) about technology and we wanted to test our skill on an actual project. We were looking at product design, how sometimes design and art get mixed up resulting in these uncomfortable chairs, weird looking tables or pointless squeezers. Is that design? Isn’t design supposed to make life easier? 

How to design something useful

Looking at the smartphone market in 2014 it was clear that every brand was focusing on solving one problem each. Blackberry solved the lack of tactile feedback by introducing its iconic keyboard, Nokia was strong on durability, Samsung was trying to improve Android pushing in lot of features, etc... However it seemed like the idea of a “modular smartphone” was still ages away. The first step was therefore selecting a number of good phones (good meaning with nice features/characteristics useful somehow to the final user) and listing what ideally should be on a smartphone ready for the next years. 

Being future proof and present ready

As for every other project, this one too started with some sketches. Sketching is extremely important and the more you sketch the more options you end up playing with. More options eventually lead you to the best option. We didn’t want to go for quirky shapes or unconventional ratios, we wanted something people might actually buy. Following the lines of the Nexus 5 we designed a device with a neutral shape, easy to hold and big enough to be able to watch video or play games without squeezing your eyes. We also decided to bring back the slider mechanism of early smartphones to be able to carry different “modules”. Defining these modules was a big part of the project as they must have a common interface to connect with the main device, they need to be upgradable and of course, useful. We did sketches and talked to people to understand what they thought their smartphone was lacking of. It turns out most people were lacking a battery big enough to last a whole day or maybe even a bit more. There it was then, the first module, a 3300 mAh battery to add in for extra time. Looking at the industry and trying to understand what trends were to be successful we also thought about a gamepad. Gaming on mobile was moving fast so having an actual gamepad with resemblance from the popular Xperia Play series was a must. We designed the “game” module thinking about emulators, racing games, platforms and all kind of games that the user may want to play. The layout is easy to understand and the size of every component is based on design principles on how to make a product ergonomic. Even the stroke of each key is carefully decided upon technical limitations and real world examples of good tactile feedbacks. The third module is a keyboard. For those professionals always writing on their smartphone it is unsatisfying and tiring to type on a phone with little to no feedback at all. Pressing keys feels more natural and the QWERTY physical keyboard leaves more space on screen for your message. Again lot of attention went to the key stroke, how to give something which doesn’t feel too flat neither too “mechanical”.

Users feedbacks

Being in a class of about 70 people it was easy to gather some quick feedbacks from our classmates. Thanks to them we thought about adding a rubber LED stripe to both protect the phone and gives the “notification LED” a new identity. We also added triggers on the back of the smartphone, based on the design of the Sony PlayStation controller. 

3D Design

After the initial step of sketching with pencils and papers, we moved to a 3D space. My friend used Rhinoceros to make the base model, then I polished the mesh on Blender. Once the final mesh was ready I exported the .obj file and created a new scene for the rendering. Again using Blender and choosing the Cycle Engine I made the materials for each part of the device: body, modules, screen, camera, etc... Once the base scene was ready we did couple of shots to decide on the lighting and colours and then proceeded to render the final images.

Spreading on the internet 

The first week of February we sent our images to concept-phones.com. The following day, ConceptPhone updated its Facebook page cover with one of our renders and published an article on its website. From there we started noticing more articles popping out on Google every day. We reached about 15 countries in few days. After two weeks we were already on lot of major websites. Fun fact: on every website the most popular comment was a meme from the animated TV Series Futurama - “Shut up and take my money”. It was a good feeling. Lots of people were asking where they could buy this phone, some even suggested starting a petition to make it a real device.

Conclusions

The Nexus P3 has been an amazing adventure. It was crucial for me to understand how to manage a project and how to set deadlines. Being students it was easy to get lost between lessons, exams and external projects. It was also a very good example of how to put into practice the knowledge in design thinking that we were getting from uni. Being able to run a project by yourself has its pros as well as cons. Two people means finding a compromise most of the time and in those scenarios it was important to put our ego away and focus on really what the user needed. We did everything by ourselves. We thought about doing something, we sketched ideas, did a lot of research around the subject, modelled the base, improved the mesh, made the materials, exported the renders and went online. It surely was one of the most exciting projects and a great chance to test run our ability to cooperate, make decisions based on real needs set and meet deadlines. I used everything that I learned from making the Nexus P3 in every project I worked on after that.