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

by Ken Kocienda

I began to look at my derby-winning design in a similar way, as if it were a successful audition rather than a sold-out performance.

I started to think about improvements,

As I pondered that small shape and took stock of my software, I got accustomed to the idea that I might need to rethink some of the decisions that led to the derby-winning design,

perhaps all of them.

This kind of collaboration was common. The programmers and designers on the Purple project were in and out of each other’s offices all the time.

We exchanged frequent feedback on our work, and all of us were expected to field questions on our specific area of development.

a common product development quandary.

People who love tech gadgets want new products that do cool new things. This creates the customer demand that gives product developers like me incentive to add new features.

Yet none of us wants these products and features to be confusing, to lead us astray, to drive us down a softw...

We’ve all owned devices that had too many ill-considered, overlapping, and inscrutable features, making the products near...

Apple’s whole identity was bound up in not havi...

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

Great products make people happy almost all the time and do the oppos...

the issues with the derby-winning keyboard were piling up:

There’s a common high-tech term for a daily regimen of using and evaluating your own product while you’re trying to develop it:

dogfooding.

more officially, we began to say “living on” to describe the day-to-day routine of living on our in-progress software like it was a real product.

He zeroed in on having multiple letters per key.

He thought that was the design decision holding back progress. That was the root problem.

His proposal was to change back to a small-key design with only on...

I doubt he had the slightest idea how it might be accompl...

But with the keyboard development experience I’d accumulated th...

I had been working for months on the QWERTY layout, tap to type, and the word-matching dictionary.

With these three technologies combined, I had a better shot at making smaller keys work.

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.

This is an important concept for touchscreen ...

The keys actually got bigger from the autocorrection standpoint, even though visually they appeared smaller to the typist.

The autocorrection software saw the F key as much larger, as shown on the right, since typing in the area of D, G, R, T, or C might result in autocorrection choosing an F, but it also might result in choosing one of those other letters.

It was up to the autocorrection code to figure out which letters on these enlarged keys you really meant.

A common typing pattern became: type a word, tap the left suggestion bar bubble to get the top dictionary suggestion, type a word, tap the left suggestion bar bubble. Again, and again, and again.

What if the keyboard automatically entered the top dictionary suggestion when you hit the space bar, making it more like the derby-winning keyboard?

This meant you might need to tap a bubble in the suggestion bar to get your exact typing if it was different from the word the dictionary software suggested,

We didn’t know, but we thought it might be the solution to the speed bump problem.

We couldn’t believe how well the dictionary figured out everything.

Even though Richard’s actual keyboarding was riddled with errors,

it was close enough to what he wanted that the software could fix all his mistakes.

Junky key presses produced perfect typing—the opposite of the garbage in, garbage out way comp...

Touchscreen keyboard autocorrection was born in that moment,

this keyboard someday might fit neatly and unobtrusively into people’s everyday lives. Maybe people wouldn’t need to stop everything else they were doing to use this gadget.

we came around to QWERTY fairly late in the progression of prototypes. We considered many other options first.

Yet, in the end, we came back around to the most familiar keyboard design.

We could have banished QWERTY forever. Yet this assumes QWERTY is bad.

It isn’t, and the reasons have to do with how taste and empathy combine with craft to make a technology like a software keyboard.

em...

trying to see the world from other people’s perspectives and creating work that fits into their liv...

Empathy is a crucial part of making g...

At Apple, we sought to be as empathetic as possible in both the initial and the ongoing experiences with a product,

Yet when it comes to making products, philosophical discourse is the wrong tool for the job when practical decisions are needed.

As a creative and technical practitioner, I couldn’t open myself to an infinite regress of ideas at every step of accomplishing a task.