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

by Ken Kocienda

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

He believed that stripping away nonessential features made products easier for people to learn from the start and easier to use over time.

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

In the same way, software demos need to be convincing enough to explore an idea, to communicate a step toward making a product, even though the demo is not the product itself. Like the movie, demos should be specifically choreographed, so it’s clear what must be included and what can be left out. Those things that aren’t the main focus of a demo, but are required to create the proper setting, must be realized at the correct level of detail so they contribute to the whole rather than detract from the vision.

Over time, Don and I began to understand and absorb the model Richard showed us. Look for ways to make quick progress. Watch for project stalls that might indicate a lack of potential. Cut corners to skip unnecessary effort. Remove distractions to focus attention where it needs to be. Start approximating your end goal as soon as possible. Maximize the impact of your most difficult effort. Combine inspiration, decisiveness, and craft to make demos.

“None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.”

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.2 (Emphasis added.)

was Scott who ultimately came up with the name that stuck: Safari. It conveyed the same world-traveler feel as other well-known browsers—Navigator, Explorer, Konqueror—but it wasn’t a slavish knock-off. It was fresh. Don liked it too and, more important, so did Steve.

Through practice after practice, drill after drill, game after game, and season after season, the Packers honed and refined Lombardi’s Power Sweep. Even though opposing teams knew the play was coming, they couldn’t stop it. In a seeming attempt to disprove Sun Tzu’s dictum that “all warfare is based on deception,” Lombardi built his victories on an openly declared challenge. To beat the Packers, you must beat the Power Sweep.

In Lombardi’s first year, with essentially the same players as the year before, the Packets won seven and lost five. The year after that, they went to the NFL championship game, but lost. Over the following seven years, the Packers won five championships, including victories in the first two Super Bowls, a step-by-step, year-by-year progression through the ranks from worst to best to legends, all built on the foundations of one humble running play, initially described on the blackboard and then executed exquisitely on the field over and over again.

In any complex effort, communicating a well-articulated vision for what you’re trying to do is the starting poin...

Don gave us his rule to realize this goal, never make the browser slower, as well as the Page Load Test, the means to accomplish it. Our browser team incorporated the PLT into our daily workflow, and we used the test results to measure and monitor our progress.

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.

As a programmer and self-professed geek, possessed of a typical geek programmer’s communication skills, 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.

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

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

More important, the opportunity cost of running all the trials meant there was less time available for everyone on the development team to dream up a design that people might like two, or three, or ten times more. 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.

The key is man’s power of accumulative selection: nature gives successive variations; man adds them up in certain directions useful to him … It is the magician’s wand, by means of which he may summon into life whatever form and mould he pleases.

We gave each other feedback, both as initial impressions and after living on the software to test the viability of the ideas and quality of the associated implementations. We gathered up action items for the next iteration, and then we forged ahead toward the next demo. I’ve given a name to this continuing progression of demo ➞ feedback ➞ next demo: creative selection.

These kinds of anti-patterns can prevent creative selection from functioning correctly, since they block the steady accumulation of positive change while developing a product. They’re not the only ways the process can break down. You could build and release products without ever living on them to see if they’re any good, as we did with Nautilus and our online services at Eazel. You could hold demo meetings and then adjourn them without deciding what to do next, a mistake that interrupts the chain of criticism that provides the logical connection from demo to demo. You could assign oversized project teams to the tasks one or two people could handle, a fault that can lead to muddled communications and a dilution of each person’s ability to make a difference. You could have conflicting lines of authority and fail to ever reach universally recognized final decisions. You could design for looks, or for fashion, or for some abstract ideal instead of designing for how a product works. You could stage A/B tests to help make simple decisions, as was done, apparently, to choose colors at Google.

To make products more approachable, designers must lighten the load on people trying to use the things they make. Even small simplifications make a difference. The good news is that I think it’s almost always possible to streamline tasks to make them less taxing.

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.

Get busy. Decide what it means to do great work, and then try to make it happen. Success is never assured, and the effort might not be easy, but if you love what you’re doing, it won’t seem so hard.