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

by Ken Kocienda

He thought that was the design decision holding back progress.

On a conceptual level, it was about designing the keyboard as a means for people to communicate their intent to the device and structuring the software so it could understand that intent.

It was too hard to build up typing speed. The keys were too small, key-by-key accuracy was too low, and entering text involved too much looking in the suggestion bar.

The refined-like response doesn’t need to be stuffy or aspire to pretentious connoisseurship, but it does need to be detailed and justifiable.

The small-scale justifications must contribute to a scheme larger than themselves. The

“Design is how it works.”

Shallow beauty in products doesn’t serve people.

what you meant versus what you did

The “eff grackles” demo highlighted the importance of having good-quality data.

we didn’t have lengthy discussions about whose imaginary puppy was cuter.

We didn’t establish large, cutting-edge software research departments sequestered from, and with a tenuous connection to, the designers and engineers responsible for creating and shipping the real products.

dilution of each person’s ability to make a difference.

mental load. It’s a fact that our working memory has hard limits, and there has been decades of study to understand the bounds of our cognitive capabilities, extending back to the psychology paper titled The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,

The photo-swiping example, in particular, should explain why you can’t “engineer” a product in one phase and then slap on “look and feel” in another.

The culture we created is inseparable from the products we created.

These weren’t software teams of hundreds or thousands.