PartⅠ. The GALAXY S4: Delivering Greater Happiness

Since cellphones are with us for almost every moment of our lives, the GALAXY S4 was developed to maximize each of these moments. This vision was realized by the extraordinarily hard work of a development team that, in February 2012, began to create a next-generation smartphone that would continue the success of the GALAXY S series. This team oversaw each aspect of development, almost like parents raising a child, from product concept through to its unveiling at Samsung UNPACKED in New York City in March 2013. This is the story of how the GALAXY S4 became a reality, and how the impressive features that made it into the commercial version were developed.

Initial project planning – a star is born

Each aspect of the GALAXY S4—whether hardware design or software features—was thoroughly researched with more than 30 different divisions of Samsung involved.  Hard work takes commitment, and these teams were in it for the long haul. These divisions included product planning, design, technical development, marketing and customer service teams.  Like adventurers, they travelled the world looking for inspiration from nature and diverse cultures, and seeking to glean insights into what customers wanted from the next GALAXY.

The teams never knew when or where inspiration would strike. On a visit to Tromso in Norway, a select group of designers witnessed the unbelievable beauty of the Aurora Borealis, more commonly known as the Northern Lights. This experience led the designers to decide on the color of the GALAXY S4 to match the aurora’s unique and distinct qualities in grabbing people’s attention and giving a sense of great vitality even in darkness.

Playing the role of international journalists, the development team sought out opinions from people from all walks of life who could give real-world insights into how and why people use their smartphones. For instance, in Cape Town, South Africa, Samsung spoke to a 12-year-old boy about how mobile phones are essential to his life and a 70-year-old man about potential features that could make the phone more convenient to use. Not surprisingly, they had vastly differing opinions, and those differences are what made the Galaxy S4 a truly smart phone.

Knowing that we are so dependent on cellphones nowadays, the taskforce focused on the word ‘life’ and examined how a phone could deliver a sense of joy and convenience to users. Four major factors were identified after much research and discussion. These include (1) Care: Empowered living to take care of health and quality of life; (2) Relationship: True connections to bring people together; (3) Fun: Meaningful moments which provide greater enjoyment; and (4) Convenience: Effortless experience to increase convenience. Samsung kept these components in mind while developing GALAXY S4, and the result is a product that delivers a sense of happiness and to ensure a convenient, enriching life.

A new approach to development – innovating innovation

When you’re innovating a new phone that is meant to be as unique as Galaxy S4, you can’t just do what you’ve done in the past.  For this reason, Samsung adopted a different development process. After defining the product’s core concept as a ‘life companion,’ Samsung conducted one-on-one customer interviews to ascertain values that consumers consider important in their daily lives, as well as to identify consumers’ specific needs regarding mobile phones.

Members of the marketing team and regional headquarters met with users all around the world, discovering the needs of the people who were at the very center of the innovation that Samsung wanted to deliver with the GALAXY S4.  Think about the different ways that you use your phone compared to your friends, family, and colleagues.  These nuances are what Samsung wanted to define and understand. How the GALAXY S4 could understand a user’s busy life and help them live a more convenient life was more important to the development team than simply making a list of possible new functions. So from the very start, the GALAXY S4 was designed complement and complete the lives of its users.

Effortless experience – wave, point, or gaze!

Since convenience was another of the core focal points of the GALAXY S4’s development, the result was the creation of the Air View feature, which allows users to hover their fingers over the screen to preview content before fully opening it. This feature was first developed for use with the GALAXY Note II and the S Pen, yet the team knew that they could maximize this feature by eliminating the S Pen and allowing users to use something they always have with them – their fingers.

Another feature similar to ‘Air View’ is ‘Air Gesture’, which recognizes the user’s hand movements above the phone’s screen. The development team conducted in-depth research into the types of hand movements people make in different situations. With Air Gesture, users can answer the phone by waving their hand and view the next image or listen to the next music track by simply moving their hand up, down, left, or right. All very simple commands that make smartphone navigation even easier.

While the Air View and Air Gesture certainly exemplify convenience, Smart Pause truly typifies convenience.  We love watching videos on our phones while we’re killing time, but we often lose focus because there is so much going on around us. Samsung Smart Pause is a feature that tracks the user’s gaze when watching a video so if they look away the video will pause, and when the user looks back the video will start-up again right away. Initially this feature did pose a question in terms of battery consumption as the camera had to be on all the time to determine whether the user was looking at the screen, but much effort was made to reduce this impact.

Next up was the Smart Scroll feature.  Visualize yourself trying to read a newspaper article or email from a friend on your phone – your head is almost always pointing downward. SmartScroll moves the text up and down based on the movements of the user’s head instead of the traditional finger scroll.  The team ran into its biggest challenge right smack in the middle of where this feature would be the most useful – jerky, unexpected head movements of users who were walking, or riding on a train or bus.  To fix these problems, the development team members came up with various algorithms after going through hundreds of tests. They added an additional option that allows people to scroll with hand gestures. Functional improvements were made so that focus was placed only on the user, irrespective of the situation.

True connections to bring people together

When it all boils down, phones are here to keep us connected to each other.  As the world becomes increasingly globalized, we need to be able to communicate in many languages when the situation arises. The language translation feature called S Translator was created with the help of Samsung’s subsidiaries across the globe. For example, Portuguese support was verified by employees at the company’s Brazil Research Center. Sentences were created in different languages for various categories, such as everyday conversation, email language, and general chat, and they were evaluated by employees at the respective subsidiaries to ensure quality and accuracy.

Stay tuned for Part II. The GALAXY S4 Connecting People Emotionally!

*All functionality, features, specifications and other product information provided in this document including, but not limited to, the benefits, design, pricing, components, performance, availability, and capabilities of the product are subject to change without notice or obligation