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

by Ken Kocienda

the rush of excitement we coders feel when we make a computer do something new using nothing more than solitude, brain power, and typing.

to understand what makes Apple what it is, its essence, you need to understand software,

no other company makes software as intuitive, carefully crafted, or just plain fun.

Every day at Apple was like going to school, a design-focused, high-tech, product-creation university, an immersion program where the next exam was always around the corner.

With that intensity came an insistence on doing things right,

without explicitly trying to do so, we developed an approach to work that proved particularly effectiv...

I have identified seven elements essential to Apple’s software success:

Inspiration:

Collabor...

Craft:

Diligence:

Decisiveness:

Taste:

Empathy:

There weren’t any company handbooks describing these elements.

On the contrary, we felt, on an instinctive level, that imposing a fixed methodology might snuff out the innovation we were seeking.

Therefore, our approach flowed from the work.

This happened from the top down, stemming from the unquestioned authority and uncompromising vision of Steve Jobs, and it happened from the ground up, through the daily efforts of...

While the seven essential elements are a distillation of what we did on an everyday basis,

they represent long-term discovery too.

An important aspect of this book is the way we built our creative methods as a by-product of t...

As all of us pitched in to make our products, we developed our approach to c...

This was an evolution, an outgrowth of our deliberate attention to the task at hand while ke...

We never waited around for brilliant flashes of insight that might solve problems in one swoop, and we h...

As we did all this mixing and combining of our seven essential elements, we always added in a personal touch, a little piece of ourselves, an octessence, and by putting together our goals and ideas and efforts and elements and molecules and personal touches, we formed our approach, an approach I call

creative selection.

Unreliable handwriting recognition gave the Newton a public relations black eye that never faded;

the product never sold well, in large part due to its lackluster text entry;

and the Newton never became the mass-market indispensable item it...

My task was further complicated by Apple’s pe...

Demos like this were the foundation of the Apple software development process,

From my standpoint, as an individual programmer, demoing to Steve was like visiting the Oracle of Delphi. The demo was my question. Steve’s response was the answer.

He would either approve a demo, or he would request to see something different next time.

Nevertheless, some mystery remained. No matter how good your work was, or how smoothly it had sailed through the preliminary reviews leading up to him, you could never know how he would react.

Sometimes he’d say he loved or hated something but then reverse hi...

Perhaps his change of heart might come a day or two later. Other times his opinions, once stat...

Although Steve’s opinions and moods could be hard to anticipate, he was utterly predictable when it came to his passion for products.

He wanted Apple products to be great, and he insisted on being involved in the process as it went along, to guide the development of the work through his reviews.

Whenever Steve reviewed a demo, he would say, often with highly detailed specificity, what he wanted to happen next.

he was always trying to ensure the products were as intuitive and straightforward as possible, and he was willing to invest his own time, effort, and influence to see that they were.

Hard to judge how effective this "micromanagement" approach could be successfully replicated elsewhere

Each person had earned their place, and kept it, by consistently providing feedback that helped make the products better.

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.

might like but that we might not be able to ship in a product.

Scott didn’t run an ivory tower research and development department. Our demos to Steve carried the promise that we could deliver,

and since showing work to Steve implied this willingness to commit, very few demos shown for the first time in these earlier meetings proceeded to him without further refinement. Sometimes there were ...

The effect registered viscerally. It was exactly the kind of self-explanatory touch that made Apple software easy to use.

When Steve asked for my opinion, it was a test.

After looking at my demo, he wanted to find out, right there, if I could help make the software better. If I hadn’t given a satisfactory answer, he would have turned to the other people in the room. They had earned their places by repeatedly passing similar tests and making much work better, as on every software detail of the iPhone.

making substantive contributions to the discussions with him was the way to earn future invitations.