Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

by Ken Kocienda

demoing to Steve was like visiting the Oracle of Delphi. The demo was my question. Steve’s response was the answer.

This push for simplicity had a purpose. Even though he was a high-tech CEO, Steve could put himself in the shoes of customers, people who cared nothing for the ins and outs of the software industry. He never wanted Apple software to overload people, especially when they might already be stretched by the bustle of their everyday lives.

When he gave me the specific feedback to remove one of the two keyboards from my iPad demo, it had a cascade effect toward greater simplicity.

Steve figured that the best way to answer difficult questions like these was to avoid the need to ask them.

I chuckle to myself over how much time I’ve spent thinking about this iPad demo and how much Steve taught me in one meeting where he spoke just four sentences.

It began to feel like I was a character in an existentialist play, doomed to a repetitive colloquy with The Compiler:

We started hooting and hollering and clapping each other on the back. We acted like we were in the scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, when our early primate ancestors were visited by the alien Black Slab about a dozen minutes into the film. Well, we aped them. We pointed and whooped. I tried the page load once more. It worked again … another black monolith! It was real!

In any complex effort, communicating a well-articulated vision for what you’re trying to do is the starting point for figuring out how to do it.

a significant part of attaining excellence in any field is closing the gap between the accidental and intentional, to achieve not just a something or even an everything but a specific and well-chosen thing, to take words and turn them into a vision, and then use the vision to spur the actions that create the results.

While I had been working hard on it, for Phil it was brand new, and he was indifferent to it. He expected the software to win him over, and apparently, it didn’t.

That breakthrough didn’t represent an end; it signaled a beginning.

Over time, I came to the conclusion that designing an excellent user experience was as much about preventing negative experiences as facilitating positive ones.

“Design is how it works.”

A better justification is that people can type on a smartphone QWERTY keyboard without thinking about it. The keyboard can melt away, it can recede, and when it does, it leaves a space for what people really care about. A properly judged mixture of taste and empathy is the secret formula for making products that are intuitive, easy to use, and easy to live with.

A/B tests might be useful in finding a color that will get people to click a link more often, but it can’t produce a product that feels like a pleasing and integrated whole.

Google factored out taste from its design process.

When it came to choosing a color, we picked one. We used our good taste—and our knowledge of how to make software accessible to people with visual difficulties related to color perception—and we moved on.

It’s difficult to maintain a wider perspective in the midst of making; you have to make sure each individual demo feedback and response cycle eventually adds up to something more.

Command line interfaces like this make computing abstract, distant, and nonintuitive for everyone but the geeks who think it’s cool to learn all the arcane incantations. For everyone else, the (correct) reaction is: “Yech!”

All these conventions made computing friendlier,

He believed that if the imagery on the screen never slipped out from under your touch, you would forget about the technology and focus on the experiences the device opened up to you.

He found we can hold only around seven items in our working memories at once. That’s it.

Interacting with technology, especially when it’s new or tricky, creates the same kind of burden as my listing quiz.

We can easily get lost in software features, and if that happens, we don’t have enough intellectual capacity to find solid ground and focus on what we’re actually trying to do.

To make products more approachable, designers must lighten the load on people trying to use the things they make.

Scott considered the number of places a person might look while typing—around the blinking insertion point was one place, and focusing attention on fingers or thumbs to tap the keyboard itself was a second place. Having the suggestion bar created a third place to look—one too many.