During the past 10 years, more than 400 million mobile-phone users have become intimately familiar with Christian Lindholm’s designs. In his new job with Yahoo! Inc., Lindholm hopes to reach far more people.
“The Internet is now at the dawn of version two,” he said. “I’m sort of feeling … that we’re at the dawn of the next big growth phase.”
Just a few weeks ago, Lindholm began his new career as Yahoo!’s vice president of global mobile products, leaving behind a 10-year tenure at Nokia Corp. He will be responsible for Yahoo!’s worldwide wireless strategy, a position he said will become more critical as wireless weaves its way into everyday life.
“What Yahoo wants to do is be as compelling and engaging for users on that electronic device that’s in the pocket. Now it’s technically feasible to do it,” Lindholm said, oozing enthusiasm through his Finnish accent. “It’s really about taking some of these things and behaviors that are done on the Internet and then designing parts of them or all of them to work nicely on a mobile.”
Lindholm is positioned uniquely to help develop the new wireless Internet. During his long stay at Nokia, Lindholm headed the evolution of the company’s popular software interface. Specifically, Lindholm designed the company’s well-known navikey user interface-used throughout Nokia’s mid- and low-end products-which features an up and down arrow, a “clear” button and a soft key. Lindholm also worked on Nokia’s Symbian Ltd.-based Series 60 UI and most recently spearheaded the development of the company’s Lifeblog application. Lifeblog does exactly what the name implies-it allows users to create a Web log of their daily activities using their Nokia camera phones.
When Lindholm started at Nokia, “we couldn’t imagine that one day it would be the UI of a video camera.”
Lindholm got his start in design by using his economics degree to study the market implications of good designs. He first based his research on various designs for scissors. However, a compulsively curious researcher, scissors didn’t hold Lindholm’s attention for long.
“I started wanting to look at more complicated products than scissors,” he said with innocent honesty.
Lindholm eventually turned his sights to handheld electronics, and his research helped him land a position at Nokia in the company’s nascent UI division.
“I thought, `This is the perfect job for me,’ ” he said.
That turned out to be true, and Lindholm has spent the last 10 years figuring out how people should interact with their phones. His navikey UI design has shipped in more than 400 million Nokia devices.
“The goal was really to make the cellular telephony experience as easy as possible,” he explained. “If you remove the number of control keys, minimize them, then you increase the sort of perceived usability. I wanted to maximize the number of keys which were universally recognized by the human race.”
Lindholm also played a critical role in the development of Nokia’s Series 60 UI for smart phones.
“I felt that the paradigm of using a pen on a small sort of a tablet is not the right paradigm for a smart phone. So I started saying that smart phones have to be one-hand operated. And I’ve repeated that somewhere around 100,000 to 150,000 times,” he said with a worn humor. “A smart phone is a smarter phone. And the whole notion of mobility is about moving computing-so you move and compute at the same time, and you cannot do that if you have to use both hands. You can’t open a door, you can’t carry a bag, you can’t drive a car, you can’t drive a motorcycle.”
Lindholm hopes to bring his formidable design skills to Yahoo!’s wireless offerings. However, his allegiance to Nokia is still apparent. During a conference call, Lindholm’s cell phone began to ring with-what else?-Nokia’s branded ringtone. Lindholm quickly apologized and changed his phone’s profile to “silent.” (Lindholm was directly responsible for introducing the idea of phone “profiles” into Nokia phones.)
“I’m sort of happy with what I was part of creating. I like using the stuff,” Lindholm said with typical Finnish understatement. “I think the stuff we made seems to work.”
Lindholm explained that the Internet is entering the dawn of a new age-V 2.0, as it’s called in the industry-where companies are making money and innovators easily can introduce new services and applications. Further, Internet 2.0 goes hand in hand with wireless. Users will expect to be able to access important information from wherever they are.
“It really requires innovation. When you mobilize something you have to prioritize, and then prioritize the things that fit into this moving context,” Lindholm said. “You’re not going to write a novel on a mobile phone, that’s clear. On the other hand, clearly the human race writes a lot on mobile phones.”
At the same time, Lindholm explained, the wireless industry is evolving to support such uses.
“Mobiles have dramatically evolved in the last three or four years to become open platforms where you really can build solutions on top of them,” he said. “Now is sort of the time.”
Indeed, Lindholm appears to have kept his optimistic outlook despite all of the trials and setbacks within the worldwide wireless industry. Although he largely declined to discuss Yahoo!’s business and the company’s strategic direction in wireless, he promised that Yahoo! engineers currently are working on something “very exciting.”
“It is something that swept me away and made me decide to jump aboard this ship,” he said. “It’s still stuff in development. It’s going to be very cool. It’s something that I’m unbelievably excited about.”
Why the continued optimism? Lindholm said working at Yahoo! will help feed his insatiable curiosity about Internet 2.0, wireless and everything else that’s worth knowing.
“I don’t know what Internet is. And I thought, `OK, I need to learn this, and this is interesting,’ so I go to the place that I think is the best place to learn what Internet is-and I thought that place is Yahoo!,” he said. “The mobile business, it had me learning for 10 years. I’m still just a guy who’s eager and excited to learn new stuff.”
