Google Pixel: How Google designed its first real phone

Google was ready for more.

Since 2010, the technology giant has partnered with companies such as Samsung, LG and Motorola to create phones that would serve as branded devices for its mobile operating system, Android. Known as Nexus phones, they used the latest version of Android available at the time, in hardware designed and marketed by these other companies.

But after the launch of the Nexus 6P with Huawei five years later, Google returned the script. He decided to make a new phone without any outside partnership. Another company would always assemble the device (a task captured by HTC), but Google alone would design, design and sell it.

Designing the Pixel, as the phone would be called, would however be like creating a phone for Goldilocks. He needed high-end equipment without compromising his style. He had to appeal to the masses without turning his back on the loyalists. And it was necessary to differentiate visually without being too clever. In other words, it had to be right.

All the right curves in all the right places

Since the first Nexus One, the Nexus brand had largely seduced Android enthusiasts who wanted a powerful phone that they could customize. It was a dedicated, but niche audience.

With the Pixel, Google wanted to attract more people than ever with the Nexus series and extend beyond the "techie". To do this, the phone had to give the impression that it was more like a friend and less like a machine.

Brian Rakowski, Google's vice president of software product management, says most people do not want their phone to be intimidating. "You want your phone to be something that helps you and you can trust, and [will help you] to make things progress."

Making the Pixel look less overwhelming began by softening its corners and softening its hard edges. The contoured angles look more welcoming and easier for the eyes, while the sharper edges are aggressive and can be alienating for some users.

Even the angled curves that surround the phone (known as "chamfered edges," a common carpentry term), could not bend too strongly. After studying how people held and carried their phones, the team settled on a chamfered curve that was comfortable to hold, but made the pixel look slimmer.

One of the curves that Google's industrial design team wanted to avoid, however, was the lens of the camera. The main priority of the team was not to create a camera without a camera, but it would be an added advantage if they could do it.

In addition to being unsightly, a bump prevents a phone from laying flat on a surface. But the Pixel camera sensor turned out to be a problem: it was big, which was fine for letting in more light, but it still had to be in the thin body of the pixel .

So, the team stalled Pixel's profile. By just thickening the top half and tying the bottom down, they could keep the camera that they wanted, avoid the bump and introduce a bigger battery to boot.

"We wanted this sensor, but we did not want to compromise," said Jason Bremner, Google's vice president of product management for mobile phones. "Because it's stuck, we have a bigger battery in this design," he said. "So we had a kind of double."

Details to obsess

In 2008, Jared Spool, the founder of the Massachusetts-based company User Interface Engineering, wrote: "Good design, when done well, becomes invisible.It is only when it is badly done that we notice. "

For the Pixel design team, it meant examining every detail, even if people did not notice it consciously. As long as the users left thinking that the phone was well designed, the team succeeded. And there were a lot of little details that they could ignore.

"People often do not notice these details, but they appreciate the fact that it's a good device," said Rachael Roberts, an industrial designer on the team.

Consider, for example, the textured power button on the Pixel, located on the right edge of the phone. The team explored different groove patterns before deciding for one last. In general, the grooves allow you to locate the key by yourself and to distinguish it from the volume. The team took care not to choose anything too brutal, but they also knew that anything that was too smooth would be useless. After traversing several iterations including diagonal lines and triangles arranged in different patterns, Google landed on a diamond pattern, hatched.

Designing the glass panel (or rather what lies beneath it) on the back of the pixel was not simple either. The panel itself is easy to spot because it gives the phone a distinct two-tone appearance between glass and aluminum. It also has the functional advantage of providing the six antennas of the phone with a larger area to receive and send signals.

But under the glass of the blue and silver versions of the Pixel is a thin film that makes the glass reflect a soft yellow hue. Called dichroic effect, it is similar to the natural multi-colored sparkle of soap bubbles. You have probably encountered dichroic glass in art, jewelry, and architecture.

The addition of this yellow reflection was an entirely aesthetic decision. The only reason the team left it in the black version of the Pixel was that everything just did not look. Similarly, the sanded treatment of the black model's aluminum housing has been given a different finish. Unlike the silky feel of blue and silver, the black pixel is more granular and rough. The reason, again, was purely aesthetic.

"We felt the blue and smoother silver finish suited them – and that black looked … cool," Villarreal said.

To let the guide's decisions be heard is not unusual for the team. Sometimes that's how design goes. You can engage focus groups, conduct surveys and do hours of research. But in the end, if something goes well, you have to trust your instinct.

Feel "really blue"

Most phones are black. Sometimes, phone manufacturers offer a white or silver version. And from time to time, there is a unique color, like the iPhone 5S Gold or the bright red model of the Nexus 5. These fun "pop" colors are useful for marketing the phone, and they often sell fast, partly because of their novelty but also because they are less numerous.

The Pixel also has a showcase color, simply known as Really Blue. Like the other colors, Very Silver and Quite Black, the name is intentionally ironic.

It appeared after Google's marketing team proposed a typical assortment of overexploited color names (ocean blue, slate, graphite). After hearing such non-original suggestions, the product team was less than impressed.

"We said to ourselves," It sucks, "http://www.cnet.com/, said Rakowski. The marketing team tried again, with a more sarcastic and more conscious approach, to finally arrive at the names we currently use. "This has definitely been felt by the brand," said Rakowski. "We like to make fun of ourselves."

To hear about cheeky names was one thing. The selection of the exact colors of the phones was also a collaborative venture that required much deliberation, especially regarding Really Blue.

In his quest to find the perfect showcase color, the team used focus groups to evaluate different color samples and models. Dozens of colors have been proposed, including an emerald green, a dusty violet, a deep yellow and a delicate blue.

But it was the dark and cheeky blue that dominated the jewel, and it resonated well across genres and age ranges. Of course, finer adjustments were necessary, which required more concentration tests and more models. But the taste of the team has also been taken into account.

"To find that the color was not easy, we did a lot of iterations," Villarreal said. "We saw this one, and it was like," Wow, that's it. "There was so much energy in it."

Depending on the light, the blue pixel ranges from brilliant royal blue to rich cobalt. Although it is generally considered a safe brand color for Google (for example, both G's of its logo have a similar shade of blue), it can still be difficult to do so if it's not. not done correctly.

Joann Eckstut, a color consultant and co-author of "The Secret Language of Color" says that blue is unique in its polarity. It can represent both the working class ("blue collar") and the very rich ("blue blood"). It is omnipresent in the sky and the seas, but remains rare in nature. And although it is widely regarded today as a masculine color, blue was more of a feminine color until the 1940s.

In the end, Really Blue walked on this thin line. It was just the right amount of funky, but not too much to discourage interested buyers.

"It reminds me of scarcity, something exclusive," Eckstut said. "It's for the unique person."

Ready for the big moment

When Google finally unveiled the Pixel to an audience in San Francisco last October, he did not know what to expect from the audience. After testing the phone internally for more than half of the year, the team was nervous. What will users think? Had they forgotten something? Was there still room to improve?

"Sometimes when you're so close to a product, the simple things get lost," said Bremner. "You are so close to details and you see all the things you could, hada, woulda."

And although there is no guarantee that the Pixel would appeal to all Goldilock (for example, there have been observations afterwards, its design has been borrowed too much from others, as the Apple iPhone or the device assembler, HTC) Google has done everything in its power to provide a phone which he would be proud to call the his.

Prejudices about button textures and avoiding cliché product names to ensure that a yellow glint does not clash with certain shades of aluminum, the Pixel was the result of great ambitions associated with incessant concessions.

"It was a try and a mistake," said Bremner. "Building a phone is honestly a compromise product – it's all about compromise and trying to find that good point."