A Cell Phone for Baby Boomers

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Changes to the product design would affect the service design, and vice versa. The voicemail system won't work with any other phone because it's designed to use the Jitterbug's YES and NO buttons for commands. Similarly, because the phones cannot be programmed directly, they couldn't be used without Jitterbug's service. "It's not just the design of the handset, or what the call centers do, it's all about the entire experience," Harris says.

Web Controls

This system approach took Jitterbug's partners at Samsung by surprise. "They knew that we would have to be a service provider, but they had no idea the extent to which we wanted to integrate [the product with the service]," Harris says. "For them it was a handset, for us it was a system. The handset was just one element."

In the same way that Apple (AAPL) was able to simplify the design of the iPod by offloading its administrative functions to the iTunes desktop software, the Jitterbug is simplified because the phone is managed entirely remotely. The configuration and programming of the phone is handled entirely through a Web-based interface—whether by the user, a relative or caretaker, or one of Jitterbug's operators—and transmitted to the phone automatically.

The Web interface even offers an option to do the unthinkable: disable a feature entirely. Turn it off on the Web, and the feature simply disappears from the phone. "We don't want them to see a screen that they don't want," Harris says. "If all the customer wants is the phone list—no call history, no voicemail—that's all they see."

The Big Picture

In designing the phone, Harris and her team had to make careful choices about which features belonged on the phone itself and which should be pushed to the Web. "We were always asking ourselves, are these things part of the service offering, or are they really administrative in nature?" Harris says.

Harris says she's considering adding features common to other phones on the market, such as a camera, but not if it compromises the experience her product delivers. A camera on a Jitterbug phone would have to be one that customers "can actually use, actually get some delight out of," according to Harris. "It's not just putting a camera in the phone. It's the rest of the experience."

Garrett is president of Adaptive Path, a user experience firm in San Francisco. He is the author of The Elements of User Experience and is an internationally recognized leader in the field. His work has been published in more than a dozen languages, and he is a frequent keynote speaker and writer on user experience strategy.