Fraser, Nick and Peter talk about interfaces. What does the Blackberry keyboard tell us about generalisation and specialisation?

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Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing BlackBerry's attempt to go smart. So Peter, can you lead us in on this please? Well yes, BlackBerry,

the mobile phone manufacturing company, recently released a new line of phones called the KeyOne and in true BlackBerry form have persisted to use their physical keyboard with physical buttons rather than moving to an on-screen keyboard where most other manufacturers, I think nearly all, I didn't find any others, like iPhones and Samsung, all use on-screen keyboards and that got us thinking why do they persist with this but also what are the relative pros and cons of having a physical keyboard versus an on-screen keyboard? Can I just ask,

Peter, you probably know this more than me but BlackBerry have been struggling in recent years, am I right? I mean they used to be the number one sort of business mobile provider right and then and now they're not so what's the story there? Yeah so they have been struggling and

the narrative is that BlackBerry's were out before smartphones were out and they've been superseded by smartphones and one of the things that happens on smartphones is the screen is built in, sorry the keyboard is built in on what is a screen rather than a physical keyboard.

I think it's fair to say that BlackBerry phones have for a long time been smartphones and because the smartphone thing is to do with... I've heard them called semi-dumb or semi-smart but anyway yeah go on. Yeah they have had sort of part of the problem is their choice of operating system isn't as good as Android or iOS but I think what's interesting is that there's I think that I think there's a more limited market of people who want a physical keyboard who would opposed to people who would rather have a bigger screen that can act as a keyboard.

I yes I think they ship as standard with end-to-end encryption but that's that's easy to retrofit on any other phone right okay right okay great it's not a unique selling point

so I'm guessing Peter is you're fairly pro BlackBerrys now I don't know why I think that

no I'm you are totally and utterly wrong I'm totally I'm totally the other way no I can see that there's some people who would prefer a keyboard but given that well what I what I can't understand is why BlackBerry persist in having a full a full keyboard well can I I mean

I think it's relevant here to discuss whether or not it's easier or better or more productive and more effective to use a specialized hard keyboard like you get with a BlackBerry now I think okay if it isn't if it isn't even as good as using a touchscreen keyboard then there's not really much to argue here it's out and out worse I think I my assumption is that you know based on my own experience is that using a specialized keyboard like you know like all phones used to have when you have the number pad and stuff is just it actually just better in a lot of ways it's just easier for your thumb to navigate you know by feel than you know on a on a touchscreen keyboard where it's much easier to make mistakes and I know that can be corrected with sort of auto correct but it's just not as good right so the question really comes down to is that screen space better used with a specialized keyboard which makes the typing bits of the experience better or is it better to leave that space potentially usable by eg angry birds or something you know you can get a whole other angry bird in if you have that area of space I mean my thing is if you're typing a lot it's just it's out and out you know trade-off I mean if you're typing a lot you probably want the specialized keyboard and if you're not then you probably don't is or is there some reason why that's not straightforward in my experience I've

not found I had a blackberry for a long time for work it was my work phone and I didn't find the physical keyboard any easier to use than the on-screen keyboard in fact in some circumstances although there is that the tactile home key thing so you can you can navigate without looking I actually found them harder to use us more likely to get the wrong key press because the keys are actually very physically small I think on the screen keyboards are very good at detecting roughly where the big the center of your big thumb blob is and get making the right guess

for what key you are going okay so if you is relatively simple because the the actual hard keyboard as it were is less desirable anyway so yours is definitely well why you know why would want that anyway but I think what Nick was saying I mean my feeling is actually I do find it easier and I did find blackberries easier than I do with an iPhone for example but for me there's yeah I'm probably an example of probably the majority of people which even if I found it easier I just don't care I'll just find I'll just go with an iPhone even though I do find it harder to type

because I do like that sort of bigger screen and I don't know why but so for really for me having the extra screen space for other things you know more information on the app an extra angry bird is far outweighs the sort of physical nature of the keyboard I think the issue here is

about optimal specialization really this is it's sort of and it's a very ubiquitous problem that we we have to sort of think about and everyone has to solve this problem is to what extent you want a solution to a problem you have to be something very specialized to that to that problem or whether you want it to be something very very general that will cope with lots of other problems and you know it's interesting if we just have spend a second looking at how what the kinds of solutions evolution has come up with that you know usually in a particular niche you'll find things which are very specialized and you know so you'll get something like a woodpecker which is very specialized to you know an environment where insects live in trees woodpecker isn't going to survive in the arctic for example whereas human intelligence is a very general kind of tool that can survive in lots of environments you know whereas our if you take something like our lungs they're highly specialized to living on land in exactly the kind of air we have which means that we although our hands are going to work fine if we go to mars because they're very general our lungs won't our lungs are very specialized now the question is what what drives us you know in one direction or the other is presumably I mean I'm just and I think you know it's actually going to depend on the nature of the problem but there's the issue of how predictable the environment is you know if it's very very predictable then you can afford to specialize but if you're going to face lots and lots of very different types of challenges you know if we if actually half the time you know the land on earth was covered by water we would evolve something which was going to cope with both circumstances and that would be more expensive you would assume you know it'd be more expensive to evolve that and I think that's that but that sort of trade-off which we face all the time in designing products you know what kinds of what what kinds of special do you want your product to be really really good at one thing or or moderately good at loads of things and I think one of the interesting findings from evolutionary history is generally uh animals and organisms that specialize are much more vulnerable to extinction because the environment might change and I think you can probably find examples of that um you know in

in the business world but that and that's distinct and quite different from saying that a specialized tool is always better than a general tool you can have general tools which are as good at lots of different things as opposed to as are as good as specialized tools at any one thing um I mean a good example is a very high quality adjustable spanner that is as good as any other of the range of spanners that it will they will cover another good example which I think is more and more important is the 3d printing if you have a 3d printer it's like it's much more costly and complicated than uh than the uh the equivalent milling milling and molding and other sort of cutting processes that you go through manufacturing but it is much much more general it can do many many more things than any one of those uh other more traditional manufacturing process but I guess

that you know an adjustable spanner is more expensive right than one spanner I mean it must be right so you know if all nuts were the same size then you know the the non-adjustable spanner would win right yeah yeah so so really the the reason that we think of adjustable spanners as being uh as being uh superior simply because we live in a world of a crazy world of different nut sizes where we can never be sure how big the next nut's going to be but presumably if you're used to working on you know if you've got a spanner which you are packing to to repair then you know you'll change your tire wheels or car wheels or something then then that's when specialization

is better right yes yeah so if you if you if you can pre pre pre-guess what range of things you're going to need so cyclists only would only carry one kind of spanner because all the nuts are

yeah and I suppose then there's the issue of the extent to which you can change the environment so that your specialized tool is is becomes more general and I suppose we've kind of done that with uh with our own human environments uh you you might superficially go wow isn't it great that our hands are exactly the right size for cups you know but but of course um we've designed the cups to fit our hands and if our if our hands were different um you know then we would be designing different objects so you know that's I suppose that's another potential response is you design a really really specialized tool and then you go around changing the world uh so that that tool will fit every situation I suppose like allen keys they always seem to be the same size uh not really there's a big range a big range of our designs are allen keys yeah but if I said give me an allen key right there's there's exactly one allen key you would give me and it's like the one that all ikea furniture is the same size oh you're asking me they made

that design constraint right exactly they can ship one kind of spanner with yeah so would it

be a better world if everything was made by ikea you know i know you just had well what would be

neat is if you had a sort of modular spanner that you just needed other spanners of exactly the same size and you could clip them together in some way to make bigger spanners and you still

only need one component to have lots of different yeah like that thing in big hero six what what there's a some guy invents these little nanobots that join together and conform any structure um i suppose that's the sort of ultimate universal tool right something which can just become anything yeah but i think i think so i mean just taking trying to move to a slightly more real world type problem i mean this is something that the military worry about all the time is you know are we are we is our military if you think of the military it's a giant tool um you know is it is it uh is it general enough to cope with as wide a range of things as as we uh as we want you know of kind of contingencies that might appear uh and and but the question is should we should we actually try and specialize it towards operations which we are going to choose to be involved in so so we might say you know well we're actually we're just not going to bother with you know large scale land warfare anymore it's not going to be something we'll we'll attempt to to tackle uh you know so we we um we no longer plan to have a military that can cope with that you know and the question of how unlikely a scenario has to be before you decide you're not going to actually gear your response to that um which is you know one example of a really common type of type of decision problem but isn't the answer that you do a bit of both is it possible to do a bit of both yeah i mean i think the answer is that it will depend it will depend on you know the costs of um what the cost of of having a generalized military is i mean you can assume i think the assumption would always have to be that a specialized thing is always cheaper now if it isn't then obviously you go for the generalized thing but in general if you can specialize if we know if we absolutely know what the three types of conflict we're going to be up against in the next 20 years is um then you know we can save a lot of money by just having armed forces that can deal exactly with those threats um but the the usually you know if you look at the history of the way that um warfare evolves is it's usually something surprising that comes along um you know so we we uh first world war you know started out being um not too dissimilar to napoleonic kinds of assumptions about how you how what the optimal way to fight a war was uh and ended up being something closer to a second world war um kind of blitzkrieg type

yeah highly maneuver yeah yeah i mean they get but it's complicated because it's uh when when you have one thing designed uh to do a specific thing often it's quite good at doing lots of other things it's it's it's very difficult to in these complicated things like warfare have highly specific tools so a ship um is very good at sailing across oceans and fighting the other ships in open oceans but it's also very useful to sit park offshore to provide a sort of mobile command center or provide a platform for sending helicopters on shore so it has lots of purposes to it likewise in the infantry soldier is a necessary component for um industrial style warfare trench fighting and and and housetowns clearances type stuff traditional sort of second world war kind of uh kind of fighting but they are very general general things they can be retrained quite quickly to do peacekeeping operations to do police support operations and to do lots of and and evacuations and things so they're very general tools so can our

conversation be summed up as generally general is good i don't think so i think i think it's more subtle than that i think it you know this is and this boils down to why the military put so much emphasis on intelligence why government in general put emphasis on intelligence and particularly on um you know forecasting and being able to being able to forecast in a strategic kind of time frame so 20 30 years because we've got to make those decisions now so we have to but we've got to buy an aircraft carrier now which we're going to potentially be using for the next 30 years um so we we have to we have to form a view about uh what things might happen now there is a kind of extreme a sort of um fatalism uh which which is not i think it's not totally without foundation where you just say look any attempt to try and forecast you know what kinds of conflicts we're going to have is doomed because we always get it wrong you know as soon as we start saying well everything's going to be like afghanistan and we're going to have you know lots of um it's all going to be based on sort of peace support and um you know small small kinds of units and special forces operations and all of that then suddenly you know the specter of a land war with russia russia arises or you know inevitably we're going to get it wrong um so so there's a sort of nihilism which says well look we're just going to all we're going to do we're not even going to think about what we're going to use it for we're just going to have really really general armed forces that are configurable and modular you know where we can easily add bits or take bits off um but obviously that is expensive uh having having armed forces that are like that it's going to cost it's going to cost you more like you know it's going to be if you've got an adjustable spanner um you know you'll sort of regret having bought that if if all the nuts turn out to be the same and i think

that that's why um aircraft carriers fighter jets all these big programs are so expensive is because they set extreme stretch targets say well what's how fast are planes today how fast we need to be to beat them how fast could they possibly be in about 20 years time let's aim for that so we can we can still head those off um and that sets very challenging engineering targets to meet and so it takes a long time to to design and test and build these things let's just going

back to the example with which we started uh with blackberry or blueberry as my mum used to call

um can you get a kind of peter can a raspberry pi interface with a with a blackberry well yes a

number of ways yeah cool yeah yeah they used to the the the mod used to have a variant of blackberries for which was more secure than the normal blackberries called redberries

nice yeah um so is it because my feeling with them is they've taken a gamble where um they said okay yes a generalist approach has become more popular and people like to use a big wide screen on their smartphones because they can do all sorts of stuff but we think there's a niche value um in having a hard keyboard and we're going to bet on that and you know blackberry once dominated um mobile devices and they kind of given up on that and said look we're just going to go after a niche of people who who like um a hard keyboard do you think that's what's happening in

this case i think yeah i think they i think they're appealing to their traditional client base who um like the physical keyboard but i think they're limiting themselves in um unnecessary limiting themselves because it's quite easy to you could have two variants for the same phone one with a slightly larger screen without the physical keyboard and just additional software to give you the keyboard um in fact the blackberry i had um you could have an on-screen keyboard next to the the physical keyboard which should be like the rick wakeman of emailing yeah choosing two separate keyboards at the same time yeah really really cool uh but yeah so it's not it's not impossible to do that i just have the way that the way that product management goes these days is quite easy to have lots of different similar products which are variants on a core product like the iphone you have multiple sizes of screen um but they're essentially the same thing are we moving to i'm

just thinking out loud here but i mean the trend over uh you know over the last sort of 30 years has been towards almost total interoperability because obviously every everything now is software more by and large you know and and almost everything can interface with everything else and i think you know people would probably be amazed looking back 30 years you know how how you absolutely had to get the right version of every bit of software you know had to be and it wasn't like you could download drivers and things if if there was an incompatibility everything had to be compatible with everything else i just wonder if we're going to move to a situation where basically you know everything you almost don't need to worry about what what you know what hardware you've got because everything will be totally yeah i think well

i think we're almost for most cases we're there now i mean you you we live our do all our it using google services and various cloud services so we could go out to the shops and buy mac machines and not suffer any kind of loss um uh so i think we're more or less there sort of yeah in the age old days you go to ibm and say we need a computer for our business and they provide everything from the power sockets all the way up to the software and whereas now it's strata there are layers which you can go right we need we need the bit that between the software bit and the disc that does the management of that bit and that's sort of called your operating system you can choose one and but you can you can and you can swap them out for different ones because it doesn't affect your application layer or the physical layer you can keep them the same so yeah it's sort of as as it's matured you've got these strata developed and you can you can swap them in and out

because they're independent a bit like getting separates for your hi-fi yes a bit like that it's really if you were you if you were a real audiophile and you listened to miles davis you'd go and get your separates but for most people you know as kind of i wanted to say full stack there you know what i mean uh you know something where it was all built in integrated a hi-fi thing was

was uh you know all the rage well this sort of leads into what i wanted to wrap up on actually which is um you know moving away from this just for a bit of fun moving away from this of general versus specific um one of the things we're kind of talking about here is a little bit about technology that has passed okay um and just for fun i just wanted to ask is there any bit of either technology or anything from from the past just indulge a bit of nostalgia but that you that you regret the passing of that you wish was still around you wish you still used

at all so take a moment to think about that but well something something that i kind of regret not that i didn't not something that i used um and it's gone away something but i said forget something that sort of was there but never really took off um is the one-handed keyboard so there's still a few little uh little manufacturers coming up with one one-handed keyboards around but it had the one-handed keyboard become standard uh as standard as your you mean for typing for sorry yeah they'll be brilliant for sort of mobile mobile um uh mobile computing because you could hold your hold your phone in one hand and navigate using your thumb like as you would with a mouse and then you can type with a little device in your pocket to at full speed as on a normal keyboard and it's a shame those those haven't really sort of course

got much traction as i think mine but i think old see peter's picked quite a recent uh obsolete technology um i i in general you know mechanical things uh are much more attractive because they can be complex but you do feel like you could look at them really hard and work out how they worked and one thing that i i really love um you know analog old old style physical communications devices the way that they used to work and my favorite one is those you know those things they used to use to send money um you know in shops they'd send that they'd to get change or to or to you know to make sure there wasn't too much money in the till they'd put they'd put the money inside a wooden ball and hoist it up on a pulley and then it would it would go on a little track into the back room where they where they kept the money that was just so cool and um you know nowadays what do they do to send money they press a button and it and it appears in a bank account it's so

boring although yeah the old those tubes uh that they used to send checks up to the yeah to check office to to get uh processed or anything with tubes valves and tubes and stuff yeah very very

back and forth and in um well in in brazil the film brazil which i think peter and i are huge fans of which shows a kind of alternative future where uh computers are all very kind of analog and uh and and quite unsophisticated and require a lot of human processing one thing um the one

bit of technology that's missed mine that i quite like and i think these think this system was quite common in german apparently in germany apparently um but i once worked at the headquarters for granada tv rentals um and i think you could buy tvs from them as well but anyway that i mean that

in itself is quite an odd thing renting tvs right i mean i i remember i rented my first couple of tvs yeah i remember renting one in ireland actually i lived there about 15 years ago tell that to a

kid today they'd be shocked yeah but listen in in granada um head office they had this really uh cool lift system which was um where it was just on a kind of conveyor a conveyor belt lift is that what it's called yeah yeah uh a part of noster yeah that's it with your legs if you get it wrong yeah but that was that was the that was what was fun about it was the frisson of danger

and yeah my they had one at birmingham university apparently my parents told me about it and apparently if you were a real kind of crazy cat you'd get in it and ride it all the way around actually does turn upside down i think at the time yeah they must do yeah yeah i'm sure it does

okay um okay well look anything um i don't know if there's anything pithy to round up on but um um yeah so in the sort of cheetah versus lion debate um i'm not sure what our conclusion is

cheetah or lion well aren't they both aren't they both sort of specialized well the cheetah is way more specialized than a lion i remember seeing a documentary about cheetahs um where they they had they were trying to rear some cheetahs in captivity you know as a kind of conservation thing and they discovered that the cheetahs simply would not eat meat if you put it in front of them they just wouldn't eat it they didn't know what to do with it and they eventually had to they had to put the meat on a trolley and make the trolley move really fast and then the cheetah would the hunting instinct would kick in and it would it would run after the meat and then it would eat the meat um i mean that's again a good example of like specialization because the cheetahs don't ever encounter meat that doesn't run away so so okay so i mean now the question is if cheetahs evolved to be as intelligent as humans what you know they wouldn't be able to just get stuff out the fridge they'd have to take it for a drive first before they before they knew to eat it

well look what i'm going to take away from this and thank you aleph for this insight is is that um if i ever i found myself in the savannah with a cheetah charging right at me

it's clear what my path is it's like a bacon sandwich in the opposite direction well i was

but in the absence of a bacon sandwich i just have to stand stock still and i shall be fine

so i did what i did want to edit i did want to say one more thing what's the word when you get animals and you collide them together it's like a kind of jam chimera chimera chimera right okay so i i i've got i'm optimistic that um that technology will make the the the idea of generality versus specialty certainly in consumer electronics much less relevant so i think there's going to be a chimeras of of cheetahs and and lions in mobile handsets there's lots of really interesting work going on in making your on your screen tactile so that you can actually feel bumps and things so you could outline on the keyboard area a keyboard and have all the same benefits of a keyboard that you had before because you've got these bumps appearing on your on your screen there we go well if someone hasn't patented that already then um

oh it's this it's long it's long being patented haptic feedback is that what it's called

no haptic well haptic feedback i think is when it it generates artificially something like when it vibrates but this would actually be a fit this will have a physical feel to it so it'd be

tactile gentlemen we'll have to stop there um i well i enjoyed that um so thank you very much as always to peter coghill and nick hare of aleph insights i'm frase mcgruer and uh thank you for listening and until next time bye