Twenty Years Of Magic From HP Designer Stacy Wolff

Look around at the personal computer market, especially mobile computing with laptops or tablets. You will find an array of touchscreens and styluses, transitioning form-factors moving from isolated screen to full keyboard. Some curious orientations of screens and keyboards to satisfy the modern lifestyle.

Stacy Wolff brought those ideas to the market twenty years ago with the revolutionary TC1000. It was one of the first 2 in 1 devices capable of running as a laptop or a tablet long before the iPad was even considered, let alone launched,

CNet’s Brian Nadel, from 2002, picked out the three need modes of the TC1000: “It starts as an extremely small, light, slate-style tablet PC, with a superior stylus compared to those of other tablets we’ve seen. Snap on the keyboard for a thin-and-light notebook with a superb three-hour battery runtime. Then dock it, and voilà—a desktop unit… the TC1000 ranks as a rakish, multipurpose standout in the Tablet PC race.”

I sat down with Wolff, now HP’s Head of Product Design, to talk about the power of transformable hardware, starting with the TC1000.

“it was uncharted territory,” he remembers. “To package it into something that portable you could put in your bag… It was a little bit of lightning in a bottle. think it’s still my number one request whenever I speak with anybody. It was one of the first products where we brought everything together, an intersection of new software development, emerging technology, and a new demand for portability.”

I was one of those users who picked up the TC1000 while on the road. It was my primary computer while covering conferences, product launches, and reporting worldwide. It felt lighter than my main laptop, but it was also a smaller screen and form factor. The ability to switch to pen input and tuck the keyboard away always caught people’s attention. Still, my main memory is that the screen was brought forward by removing the touchpad on the keyboard, and the footprint was much smaller. It was one of the few Windows devices that could be used with ease while flying in economy,

Yet there was little to suggest that the TC1000 would have such an impact on myself or others before they used this mysterious laptop/tablet combination. How did Wolff know that the demand was there?

“We didn’t,” he laughs. “In this case, there were a lot of early indications that the technology had come far enough to make it viable, and there was a need for a device like this, whether we went through a focus group or sharing plans with various parties.”

Let’s jump forward to the present day. The design ethos never really changes, so what is Wolff using this month, which he was also using with the TC1000 design?

“I would say a couple of things; one is never to assume you know because you don’t. Young designers often come into the world and say, “I know how to solve this!” Maybe they know it for themselves, but not for the various audiences.

“It’s about empathy, and I think empathy is probably the hardest thing to teach. Young designers should ask themselves, “How can you be more empathetic to the customer?” Put yourself in that customer’s shoes, as we do daily.”

How much of modern design is driven by science, research and focus groups today? Can you still grab a pencil and paper and design it with your gut?

“I think it’s a little bit of a balance. After many years in the business, I can tell you what my gut tells me. I ask, ‘Why are we doing this? Who is it for? What are the need states of that user? What is that emotional connection?’

The idea of designing for these multiple scenarios of need states accelerated during the covid pandemic as the world went into lockdown. One of the most visible changes both to hardware and how we interacted highlighted by Wolff was video calling. “instantly, video and microphone became super important and we became snobs, your video is better than my video. Yet I can share this and you can share that…everything changed at that one point.”

Cloud Wars highlighted the rapid rise of videoconferencing during lockdown: “One of these changes involves increased use of video conferencing as a means of communicating or holding work meetings. Zoom, for instance, had 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019, but by April 2020, that number had risen to over 300 million.

Hybrid working saw a renewed focus on hardware that could work in several scenarios. “Suddenly, we saw that home and work were interchangeable. At the time when we all went home, we had to solve different problems.”

Those lessons are still with us. Wolff picks out HP’s recent Omen Transcend 14 gaming laptop. “It’s a very transformational product. For the first time, we have a shift from pure gaming to a balance between ‘school by day’ and ‘games by night.’ It’s a balance of power, not to extremes, but it’s a lot. It’s not specifically thin and light but pretty thin and light.”

PC Gamer’s Dave James: “The HP Omen Transcend 14 is then an effective gaming laptop. But it’s certainly not offering a stellar performance, being honest, with more of a focus being kept on maintaining a balance. HP has kept the internals in check to the point where it doesn’t get too toasty on the lap (though the CPU will regularly bounce off the 100°C+ mark when pushed, pfft, Intel, eh?).

Moving between gaming and schoolwork is a coarse example of fluidity, moving between different states. “The systems that we’re developing now. I think we seek to solve bigger problems and one of the biggest challenges I think we have overall is the fluidity of moving from one state to another. Look at the Spectra Fold; I can easily open it. flatten it, erect it, whatever you want to consider the position. It’s just, what do you want, right?”

A good design can delight the consumer with expected and surprising elements. “I think people love a little magic; they love to always talk about that magic. Just like the TC1000, I think you find something in the design process that’s quite nice, then it takes a lot of work to make it magical.”

What does Wolff do next? “I keep digging. There’s a need always there and you just have to ask your your questions or probe a little bit differently to find it. What I think is always satisfying is when someone discovers that a product does something that kind of scratches an itch… An itch we had thought of before they even knew they needed it.”