State of Duarte

With HP Palm finally doing something with WebOS, Windows Phone 7 showing off a stylish design, and Google close to announcing Gingerbread, the next version of Android, it only makes sense to casually think about the design that goes into these platforms and the people responsible for them.  Of course, Apple has Steve Jobs, Scott Forstall and a small team that works on UI elements of IOS.  Microsoft has had a larger team of engineers working on Windows Phone 7, but most of the Metro interface design was set in place prior to the release of the Zune HD.  That leaves us with Palm’s HP WebOS and Google’s Android, two platforms that could end up being more closely related than anyone could have thought even just a few years ago.  The key player in this relationship is Matias Duarte, the former Senior Director of User Interface at Palm.  In May of this year, Duarte was hired away from Palm to join Google as the User Experience Director for Android.  This was a relatively small story at the time, but one that could have giant implications in the competition for smartphone supremacy if, and this is a big if, the relationship works out.

For those who don’t know, Duarte first made his mark at Danger as the leader of the team that created the Danger Hiptop, which would later be re-branded and known as the T-Mobile Sidekick.  Of course, the co-founder of Danger was Andy Rubin, who went on to found Android and still operates at Google as a VP of Engineering, primarily overseeing Android.  Rubin undoubtedly took note as Duarte crafted the immensely-popular Sidekick and followed that work up with the design of Palm’s WebOS.  At CES in 2009, it was Duarte who was guiding the audience through most of the demos of WebOS, not Palm’s Jon Rubinstein.  Two innovative and refined projects didn’t just happen by luck for Duarte, who is known in the industry for being very particular and demanding in his pursuit of a clean experience.  It’s no surprise, then, that we have yet to see a mobile operating system with the polish of WebOS outside of the iPhone or the impending release of Windows Phone 7.  That attention to detail is undoubtedly what Rubin wanted to acquire in hiring Duarte, but it also may prove to be the major hurdle integrating that vision with the user experience of Android.

In retrospect, Palm was the perfect company for Duarte to execute his ideas, a small company that controlled both hardware and software that needed to reinvent itself to stay relevant and a part of the smartphone landscape.  He appears to have had free reign to control the design until its official unveiling.  The only opinions that mattered were ones from Palm and the team shaping WebOS.  But just as it’s sometime easier to tear a building down and start from scratch, it may prove easier to rebuild a mobile OS from nothing than to change an already-popular one.  The corporate culture at HP seems to be driving all of the senior talent away from what’s left of Palm, which probably contributed to Duarte’s decision to leave and take up a new challenge.  What awaits at Google, though, may not prove to be an easy fit.

For starters, Android has now been in the market for over two years and has developed a large following, particularly in the U.S.  Those customers have become accustomed to the basic operations of Android, menu buttons and all.  Any changes to the fundamental experience might not prove popular, particularly since Google has positioned Android as the anti-iOS, a customizable experience that encourages experimenting with the setup and doesn’t dumb things down for the average consumer.  An even greater challenge will be the incessant skinning that has taken hold among the handset manufacturers and the carriers.  The stock Android experience is a pretty rare one to come across these days, shipping right now on only the G2 and a number of mid-range Sprint phones.  Even the Sprint phones aren’t totally stock Android because they place front-and-center the Sprint ID system of instantly wrapping the phone in a layer of pre-selected apps.  Let’s also be very clear that the manufactures and carriers are not doing this to “improve” a bad experience on Android.  A better Android experience will not convince them to stop customizing the phones.  One only needs to look at the terrible “improvements” of Motorola’s Blur and Samsung’s TouchWiz to see that these skins are only a bad attempt to differentiate the phones, rather than present what’s best for the consumer.

Duarte’s insistence on holding to his design ideas at Palm may not translate well at all to an Android platform that is controlled by so many and distributed by so many others.  Is he going to have free reign to impose his design on this established platform?  Even if he does, will anyone be able to stop other companies from changing Android to suit their own needs?  If we’re to take seriously anything Andy Rubin has said about Android’s licensing and open source aesthetic, the answer will be no.  And when that happens, will Duarte be content as the head of a ship he can’t both navigate and captain?  In the end, this experiment may work out, but it will be in spite of the existing state of Android, not because of it.  While there is little doubt that Android needs more polish and care put into the end user experience, this is one genius design guru who may be a poor fit for the system.