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

by Ken Kocienda

There was never any finger-pointing; however, there was an expectation that new demos would include a response to the feedback from previous demos. This was t...

They repeatedly asked themselves the same basic questions during these periodic reviews: Does this demo close the prototype-to-product gap, even a little? Are we seeing enough positive change over last time? Is this technology or app on track?

There were no prototypes in the Industrial Design studio that included anything like a BlackBerry-style keyboard. The Purple concept was built around a large touchscreen and a minimum number of fixed buttons.

Apple had bet everything on a software keyboard.

when it came to figuring out how to type on a flat display without tactile keys, we weren’t figuring it out fast enough.

“Starting from now, you’re all keyboard engineers.”

In all my years at Apple, we’d never before halted a fifteen-person project to focus everyone on a single problem.

Now we’re accustomed to tapping away on touchscreens, but in these early prototyping days, all of us on the Purple hallway felt a twinge of apprehension when it came to tapping tiny targets on a Wallaby,

because at the crucial moment, your finger covered up the thing you were trying to tap, and you couldn’t see what you were doing.

Picking the correct gesture on a letter-by-letter basis created an additional mental burden that made it hard to think.

Coupled with the redistribution of letters into unfamiliar layouts—almost all of our prototype keyboards did away with the standard QWERTY arrangement—none

none of them was easy to use.

it was great to be an Apple employee. The company had an immense back catalog of projects, research, and resources.

it’s not enough to look at how we arrived at a promising result on a new technology after a determined push over a few weeks and explain it by saying: We collaborated.

Exactly how we collaborated mattered,

for us on the Purple project, it reduced t...

We showed demos to each other. Every major feature on the iPhone started as a demo, and for a demo to be useful to us, i...

We needed concrete and specific demos to guide our...

an unsophisticated idea is hard to discuss constructively without an arti...

Consider the scenario. Two people have imagined two cute puppies. I assert mine is cuter. What do we do now?

Do we have a cuteness argument? How can we? We have nothing to go on.

The scenario is ridiculous. There’s no way to resolve this conflict.

Without a concrete and specific example of a cute puppy, there’s no way to make progress.

The point is that concrete and specific examples make the difference

At Apple, we built our work on this basic fact.

Demos made us react, and the reactions were essential. Direct feedback on one demo provided the impetus to transform it into the next.

Demos were the catalyst for creative decisions, and we found that the sooner we started making creative decisions—whether we should have big keys with easy-to-tap targets or small keys coupled with software assistance—the more time there was to refine and improv...

Making a succession of demos was the core of the process of taking an idea from the intangible to the tangible.

Making demos is hard. It involves overcoming apprehensions about committing time and effort to an idea that you aren’t sure is right.

The psychological hurdle only grows taller with the knowledge that most demos—almost all of them—fail in the absolute, dead-end sense of the word.

This prospect of likely failure can make it tough to sit down, focus, and make a demo at all.

We rarely had brainstorming sessions.

If brainstorms run longer than an hour or so, or if there are more than a handful of people in attendance, or if they’re a common occurrence, they can devolve into a form of sneaky procrastination.

Whiteboard discussions feel like work, but often they’re not, since it’s too difficult to talk productively about ideas in the abstract.

we picked a point over the technological horizon and, together, we set out toward it, unsure if we were headed in exactly the right direction.

It was hard to orient ourselves—the touchscreen text entry landscape didn’t exist yet.

Yet that’s what innovation opportunit...

The field was wide open, so, when any of us had a new concept for a keyboard, we made a demo to commu...

We couldn’t get away with telling. We were re...

We had to work like this, because the team didn’t accept anything unless it was concrete and specific,...

Then we tried out each other’s demos, said what we liked and what we didn’t, and offered suggestions for improvements, which led to more demos and more f...

Finding the answers became a balancing act among craft, taste, and empathy—developing touchscreen text entry technology that was efficient, likable, and intuitive.

The Newton was groundbreaking in concept and form factor,

but it was sunk by its problematic handwriting recognition.

While the Newton was also hampered by its lack of connectivity, a dearth of compelling use cases, and the absence of a killer app—a program so good that people would buy the devic...

The substandard speed and accuracy of the Newton’s stylus-based text entry drowns out all oth...

To succeed where the Newton didn’t, I would need to do more than solve the next technical problem.

It wouldn’t merely be a matter of coding craft.

The keyboard was different. None of us knew how a touchscreen keyboard...

I had to constantly ask myself whether what seemed like a good solution to me was actually a g...