A Cell Phone for Baby Boomers

How Jitterbug designed a mobile phone and service to appeal to even the most technophobic seniors

by Jesse James Garrett

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Selling technology to technophobes may not seem like smartest business strategy, but when the technophobes in question are the 100 million baby boomers and seniors in the U.S., bridging the technology gap starts to look like a real market opportunity.

For mobile-industry veteran Arlene Harris, the opportunity was too good to pass up. Harris is the mastermind behind Jitterbug, a company launched last October that combines a unique mobile phone (designed by Jitterbug and manufactured by Samsung) with a suite of services designed to meet the needs of older users. Because Jitterbug controlled both the product and service design, it's able to deliver a seamless, innovative cross-channel experience, a rarity in the mobile-phone industry.

Providing familiar touchstones to ease the mobile-phone experience became a major part of Jitterbug's design after early research showed that older users found conventions like signal strength meters unfamiliar and confusing. Instead, when you open a Jitterbug phone it emits—get this—a dial tone. "If there's no dial tone, you can't make a call," Harris says. To reach a Jitterbug operator, who can place calls or answer questions for you, dial 0.

Getting Back to Basics

Some elements of Jitterbug's industrial design may seem like quaint throwbacks, such as an earpiece that actually covers your ear and a microphone next to your mouth, not somewhere around your cheekbone. But while these elements undeniably reinforce a sense of comfort and familiarity for Jitterbug's users, they also have practical functional benefits. For example, the soft rubber cup around the earpiece doesn't just make the phone more comfortable, it also blocks ambient noise, making the phone easier to use for the hearing-impaired.

Instead of icons or menus, the phone presents features as a series of simple questions, which the user answers with the bold YES and NO buttons on the handset: Do you want to check your voicemail? If not, press NO and the phone will ask if you want to look at your phone list instead. Jitterbug offers two models: one with a typical telephone keypad (albeit with larger, brighter buttons than most mobile phones) and one with no keypad at all. The Jitterbug OneTouch has just three buttons: one to dial 911, one to reach a Jitterbug operator, and one that can be programmed with a number chosen by the user.

Harris says the company grew directly from the idea of delivering a better experience to older users. "I had some ideas about how the experience of actually using a cell phone could be more comfortable for older people," she says, "ideas about how we could make cell phones and the services around them more friendly for people who weren't going to adopt [the products that were out on the market]."

A Sympathetic Ear at Samsung

But to deliver that experience, Jitterbug would have to defy all the trends in the mobile industry, particularly the trend toward smaller handsets packed with ever-growing lists of features. "I said, 'We need to think this whole thing through, and sort of erase everything that we've got so far. Let's redefine what we should be doing, based on research and based on good old common sense,'" Harris says.

Harris thought she might have difficulty convincing a manufacturing partner to go along with her idea, but she found a sympathetic ear at Samsung. She says "they knew that there was a huge opportunity for this older market, but none of the carriers were interested." Harris showed some prototype phones to Samsung, and two hours later, executives there were convinced. The final Jitterbug phones were designed in close collaboration between Harris and Samsung's industrial designers, and took about two years to bring to market.

Harris recognized that a product alone couldn't meet the needs of her audience—it had to be combined with services to create an overall system. As a result, the product was designed in tandem with services that would be delivered to subscribers.