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

by Ken Kocienda

Taste is developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole.

It’s not always easy to come to grips with objects or ideas and think about them until it’s possible to express why you like them or not, yet taking part in a healthy and productive creative process requires such reflective engagement.

When I study the past, I make a point of deciding what I like, and sometimes this built-up catalog of refined-like responses about past works finds a suitable outlet and a natural expression in my present-day work.

The design responsibility expands to balancing the many individual refined-like responses against the other side of the taste equation, the attempt to create a pleasing and integrated whole.

Design is how it works.

The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, to be able to get the best of both, to make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive, easy to use, fun to use, so that they really fit the users. The users don’t have to come to them, they come to the user.2

Charged Buttons: The actual geometry for the back button in the top navigation bar is too small to tap comfortably, so the button is charged, which means the active area the software recognizes for tapping is larger than the visual area for the button.

The distance between the perception and actual lines may not seem like a lot, but if the software didn’t warp touches, it would feel like the touchscreen isn’t accurate. The visual representation of the Back button . . . . . . was smaller than its active area. An approximation of the enlarged active area, the result of “charging” the button, is shown by the light shading.

United States Patent 7,479,949, sometimes called the ’949 Patent when dealing with Apple lawyers, or just the iPhone Patent when not. Its formal title is Touch Screen Device, Method, and Graphical User Interface for Determining Commands by Applying Heuristics.7

pleasing effects, or a way to give people what they meant rather than what they did. It takes effort to find what these things are, which is appropriate, since the etymological root of “heuristic” is eureka, which (of course) comes from the Greek and means “to find.”

This is where that word, “eureka,” actually figured into our development process, since good heuristics don’t come in brilliant flashes, but only after patient searches, and it wasn’t always clear to us that we had found the right heuristic even when we had. We arrived at our final decisions only with judgment and time. Heuristics are like this. They’re subjective.

When we got an idea, we cobbled together a first cut on the algorithms and heuristics we would need to illustrate it. Then we pulled together the supporting resources—code, graphics, animations, sounds, icons, and more—to produce a demo. After we showed the demo and shared some feedback with each other, we made decisions about changes that might be an improvement. Many times this came down to tuning some heuristic, or modifying how an algorithm and heuristic combined. Whatever it was, the concrete and specific modifications we chose to make led to the actions items that justified making the next demo. Repeat, then repeat again. Doing this over and over again set our projects on the slow path to accumulating positive change. This is how we started with an idea and finished with software for a product.

Here’s the full list of the seven essential elements again, and this time, I’ve supplemented them with specific examples drawn from my stories: Inspiration, which means thinking big ideas and imagining about what might be possible, as when Imran saw how smooth finger tracking would be the key to people connecting to iPhone experiences through touch Collaboration, which means working together well with other people and seeking to combine your complementary strengths, as when Darin and Trey helped me make the insertion point move correctly in WebKit word processing Craft, which means applying skill to achieve high-quality results and always striving to do better, as when the Safari team made the web browser faster and faster by running the Page Load Test, trying to understand what this test program told us about our software, and using these findings to optimizing our code Diligence, which means doing the necessary grunt work and never resorting to shortcuts or half measures, as when we persisted through the tedium of fixing cross-references to get Safari to build in the lead-up to the Black Slab Encounter Decisiveness, which means making tough choices and refusing to delay or procrastinate, as when Steve Jobs made me pick the better keyboard layout for the iPad on the spot while he waited rather than just offering the two different designs Bas and I developed Taste, which means developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integ...

Ten people edited code on the Safari project before we made the initial beta announcement of the software, and twenty-five people are listed as inventors on the ’949 Patent for the iPhone.

A small group of people built a work culture based on applying the seven essential elements through an ongoing process of creative selection.

A small group of passionate, talented, imaginative, ingenious, ever-curious people built a work culture based on applying their inspiration and collaboration with diligence, craft, decisiveness, taste, and empathy and, through a lengthy progression of demo-feedback sessions, repeatedly tuned and optimized heuristics and algorithms, persisted through doubts and setbacks, selected the most promising bits of progress at every step, all with the goal of creating the best products possible.