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

by Ken Kocienda

seven elements essential to Apple’s software success: Inspiration: Thinking big ideas and imagining what might be possible Collaboration: Working together well with other people and seeking to combine your complementary strengths Craft: Applying skill to achieve high-quality results and always striving to do better Diligence: Doing the necessary grunt work and never resorting to shortcuts or half measures Decisiveness: Making tough choices and refusing to delay or procrastinate Taste: Developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole Empathy: Trying to see the world from other people’s perspectives and creating work that fits into their lives and adapts to their needs

This was part of Steve’s mission for Apple, the most significant strand of Apple’s product development DNA: to meld technology and the liberal arts, to take the latest software and hardware advances, mix them with elements of design and culture, and produce features and products that people found useful and meaningful in their everyday lives.

Unlike what Firefox does on the Mac 🙄🙄

These questions became moot, and that’s good, because they don’t necessarily have easy answers. Steve figured that the best way to answer difficult questions like these was to avoid the need to ask them.

People are fallible and computers are unforgiving.

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.

it was a revelation to me that both the setting and the solution to my hardest technical problem turned as much on the social side of my job as it did on the software side.

designing an excellent user experience was as much about preventing negative experiences as facilitating positive ones. It couldn’t be an even trade-off either. Great products make people happy almost all the time and do the opposite rarely, if at all.

dogfooding. I never liked this term myself, and it didn’t appeal to Apple sensibilities either. Pet food isn’t typically thought of as a pinnacle of product development. On the Purple hallway, we were trying to make excellent products for people, and while we sometimes said “dogfooding” inside Apple, more often, and more officially, we began to say “living on” to describe the day-to-day routine of living on our in-progress software like it was a real product.

leave it to Apple to be too "think different" to even call dogfooding internally what it is

empathy as trying to see the world from other people’s perspectives and creating work that fits into their lives and adapts to their needs. Empathy is a crucial part of making great products.

the autocorrection algorithm became this: Arrange typed keys in a set of tumblers with their neighboring keys. Spin the tumblers to check every letter combination. Note the dictionary words found by spinning the tumblers. Calculate the pattern skew for every found word. Multiply the usage frequency value for each found word with the reciprocal of its pattern skew. From all the found words, suggest the one with the greatest multiplied total of usage frequency and pattern skew.1

when I walked into the Moscone Center on keynote day, I still didn’t know what Purple would be called. On the tenth of January 2007, the day after the big product introduction, I edited the autocorrection dictionary to add a new word: iPhone.

At Apple, we never would have dreamed of doing that, and we never staged any A/B tests for any of the software on the iPhone. 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.

If you ever wondered why iPhones and iPads often show 9:41 as the time on the lock screen and in the status bar in ads and posters, the reason is that the Apple keynotes were often planned out to do the biggest product introduction about forty minutes into the show. (Note that online videos of these presentations omit clips of copyrighted material from music, TV shows, and movies, so the times are off.) The idea was to have the time in the marketing photos of the new product match, or at least be close to, the actual time in the hall at the moment of the reveal. So it was for the iPhone. After that, using 9:41 became a tradition, perhaps a superstition. Apple Watch uses 10:09 for a totally different reason—that’s just how the designers thought the hands looked best, especially on analog faces. Go figure.