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

by Ken Kocienda

Working at the intersection is not only about honing details so that an individual icon, animation, or sound achieves an aesthetic ideal in isolation.

Liberal arts elements and state-of-the-art technology must combine, and the end result can be judged only holistically, by evaluating how the product fits the person.

Tapping the correct icon was satisfying, since it made the whole iPhone interface become a note taker, a web browser, or a calendar. Moving from task to task happened at the speed of thought. Tapping the wrong app icon could be jarring, like realizing you picked up a fork instead of a spoon only after dipping it in a bowl of soup.

Throughout this book, the author not only focuses on user expieriences but, critically, the emotions they would feel under different scenarios. And while Apple famously doesn't do focus groups, employees are continually using prototypes to gauge this user experience for themselves, then sharing their thoughts and feelings using radical candor.

their differing user experiences provided us with proof early on in our development process that one of the most important user interactions for the iPhone rested on this question: What’s the best size for a home screen icon?

Scott’s game gave us the answer we were looking for.

The tap targets for home screen icons on the original iPhone were fifty-seven pixels square.

One of the key concepts of the iPhone user interface is

direct manipulation.

This idea refers to giving software objects some of the same attributes and behaviors as physical objects, enabling people to interact with digital bits as if they were real-world items.

I love this concept and it is critical to gaining adoption of never before seen technology - by making it a familiar experience.

Acting directly on an object produces a result, and there’s a constant flow of sensory feedback—visual, tactile, auditory—to help you monitor your progress.

Throughout the history of computing, such humdrum activities have never been that easy.

For decades, computers compelled users to type text commands to interact with digital objects, and this conceptual distance made ...

Command line interfaces like this make computing abstract, distant, and nonintuitive for everyone but the geeks who think it’s cool to learn all the arcane incantations.

Apple didn’t invent direct manipulation—a computer scientist named Ben Shneiderman did in 19825—but the Mac was quick to popularize it.

The Mac and the mouse helped to establish the Apple tradition of using new technology to solve age-old interaction problems, and this approach served as inspiration for many years to come.

Even before the Purple project started, a few designers and engineers at Apple believed finger-based multitouch software had the same potential as the mouse. They believed that touch could move the interaction model of computing to the next level of directness.

Imran used this piece of paper gliding around under his finger to show how iPhone direct manipulation should feel, and for him,

the feeling of it was essential.

This feeling had a purpose.

if the imagery on the screen never slipped out from under your touch, you would forget about the technology and focus on the experiences the device opened up to you.

mental load.

It’s a fact that our working memory has hard limits,

we can hold only around seven items in our working memories at once.

That’s it.

Trying to handle more than sevenish things in our minds simultaneously requires us to start making chunks or, as Miller puts it, to crea...

if we can’t free up slots in our mind by making chunks when a lot of information is coming at us, we become overloaded, and once our working memory is filled, we begin to make more errors and less accurate judgments. Our ability to function falls off fast.

My experience making products has taught me that this limit is real. Interacting with technology, especially when it’s new or tricky, creates the same kind of burden as my listing quiz.

it doesn’t take much to knock our minds off course when we’re navigating ...

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 t...

Similar possibilities to simplify almost always exist in real product development,

and at Apple, we went looking for them.

These opportunities weren’t always easy to see. It wasn’t always obvious what parts of a system, if jettisoned, would trigger a genuine less-is-more response.

The suggestion bar was one more thing for our mind to juggle, and stopping to scan the bubble to see if it contained the word we wanted was actually slower than just continuing to pound out keys and letting autocorrection clean it all up.

Determining comfort levels, pursuing smoothness, and reducing mental load are examples of the kinds of ergonomic, perceptual, and psychological effects we often aimed for, and in each case, honing and tuning technology to a high level became the means to achieve people-centered results.

We used the word “heuristics” to describe aspects of software development that tip toward the liberal arts. Its counterpart, “algorithms,” was its alter ego on the technical side.

Heuristics and algorithms are like two sides of the same coin.

Both are specific procedures for making software do what it does: taking input, applying an operation, and producing output...

Algorithms produce quantifiable results, where progress is defined by measurements moving in...

Algorithms are like this. They’re objective.

Heuristics also have a measurement or value associated with them—the

the duration for an animation or the red-green-blue values fo...

but there isn’t a similar “arrow of improvement” that always ...

Unlike evaluating algorithms, heuristics are hard...

We always made demos to evaluate the ...

I would often sit down with an HI designer like Bas or Imran to make preliminary decisions about gestures and animations, then we would review our preliminary choices in larger groups, then...

We used the same scheme to develop heuristics for ...

The answers to all of these questions were numbers, and might be 0.35 seconds for the app animation, or 30 pixels for the swipe gesture, or 4x for photo zooming,

but the number was never the point.