Drew Bamford, VP of user design at HTC. (Dan Schlatter/PSBJ)

The U.S. headquarters of Taiwan-based smartphone maker HTC is in Bellevue. With the recently unveiled HTC Sensation 4G smartphone and HTC Flyer tablet spread out on the table before him, interactive product designer Drew Bamford spoke about the company’s relationship with Microsoft Corp., patent controversies and the company’s newest toys.

Recently, we sat down and had a chat with Bamford, who is vice president of user experience at HTC. Here is what we talked about:

HTC was traditionally a Windows operating system user, but now you’ve moved toward the Android OS. How has it changed your relationship with Microsoft? We still have a strong partnership with Microsoft. I mean it’s obvious Android still has a lot of momentum in the market, and we’re selling a lot of Android phones. But from a strategic and even design standpoint, we’re still really just as committed to Windows phones. We think Microsoft did an excellent job with the design of Windows Phone 7, and it was a total revolution for them, and we get really good feedback on our Windows Phone 7 products. So the fact that right now it doesn’t have the same momentum as Android doesn’t cause us to waver in our commitment to Windows. We think it’s good for our customers to have choices — that’s what it comes down to.

Why did HTC’s new research and development office go to North Carolina instead of Seattle? HTC has a number of offices worldwide. For instance, we have this office here in Seattle, another in San Francisco, (and) the headquarters, of course, where at least 90 percent of the employees work is in Taipei. So what we’re doing here, and in Taipei, is working on products that are coming out in the next, maybe, 24 months. The N.C. office is one of the offices that is looking at things that are further out, like two to four years.

What’s so sensational about the HTC Sensation? So this product has some new innovative features. It’s got a curved lens, a concave, contoured lens that lets you put it down on its face and it won’t scratch. The big story, really, is we’ve taken a flagship technology product — something that has all of our highest technology — and packaged it in such a way that we think it will appeal to a broad consumer audience. Also, this screen gives you more pixels and more screen real estate but fits better in your hand and is pocketable. On the software side, the lock screen is really different and can be personalized.

HTC Sensation 4G

How about the tablet? Rather than just replicating our phone experience on a bigger screen, we really redesigned and rethought our experience to make it work better on a tablet format. You’ll see it feels like the same family, similar interactions (as the phone), but now it does some new things. Like in landscape mode, you can actually see more information in the carousel of pages. And when you dive into the application, you get applications that are optimized for the landscape view. Like email, for instance. Also, we looked a lot at how people take notes in real life, like with a pen, and found that keyboards are great for some things, but there’s certain kinds of interactions where you want to have this kind of control. Especially like annotating documents, you can bring up a PDF or look at a webpage, circle something, and email that document to a friend. The pen adds a new, more natural way of interacting.

OK, the Flyer vs. the iPad: We don’t directly compare ourselves to the competition. I’d say there are a lot of differences, the pen interaction is one of them, and just fundamentally the way that we offer a very personalized experience on the product, it’s just a different approach. So rather than a field of icons on your home screen, you actually get all of the information that’s important to you right at your fingertips (on the carousel), without even having to go into an application. I think that’s a totally different model.

You must be pretty happy that the staff of the U.S. International Trade Commission recently said that HTC didn’t infringe upon iPhone patents: I couldn’t really comment specifically on whether (Apple’s patent case against HTC) went well or went poorly. We absolutely believe in protecting innovation. As a company, we’ve had some of our designs copied by competitors in the past, and we’re careful to protect that. But we don’t feel we’ve infringed on anyone else’s copyright.

What does the VP of User Experience do? They’re trying to figure out how to make all of the powerful technology of our products easy for people to access, easy to use. Then I have a team of visual designers, visual and motion designers that make everything fluid and move easily, look beautiful, (and) work on transitions between parts of the system. Then I have a couple of sound designers who do all of the ringtones, sound effects, and also work on soundtrack for our video and launches. Here I have one usability researcher, but in Taiwan I have a team of about 15 researchers, and they’re testing our products on people, and also getting out and doing more proactive work where they do surveys, and observe people using competitive products so we can understand what problems we may encounter. I also have a team of prototypers who build interactive prototype that we can test.

So are patents good or bad for the industry? It’s a difficult balance, I think, between protecting the hard work that people have done to design innovative products and, of course, offering the best products and experience to customers. I think there probably does need to be some reform in the way patents are granted, the way the patent office works, but I’m not a lawyer.

What’s your favorite project you’ve been a part of? That’s like asking which is my favorite child! … But usually it’s the most recent one. The Sensation and the Flyer are really excellent work from my team and we’re all very proud of that.

How long do your projects usually take? We’ve been working on the tablet for at least a year. We’d had tablet prototypes before that, but sometimes a project gets to a certain point and we say, “This really isn’t working,” so we sort of start over, and that happened on the tablet.