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

by Ken Kocienda

As a maker of products, I always turned less to the theoretical and more to the applied.

Taste

is developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole.

A lack of specific thoughts isn’t a big deal when picking fruit to put on top of breakfast cereal,

but such gaps are an issue in creative work. Persist too long in making choices without justifying them, and an entire creative effort might wander aimlessly.

The results might be the sum of wishy-washy ...

Developing the judgment to avoid this pitfall centers on the refined-like response, evaluating in an active way and finding the self-confidence to form opinions with...

Building trust in a personal refined-like response takes time and practice.

It also requires a measuring stick.

The past is a source of the timeless and enduring.

When I study the past, I make a point of deciding what I like, and sometimes this built-up catalog of refined-like responses about past works finds a suitable outlet and a natural expression in my present-day work.

He instinctively knew how to type. His QWERTY mental map translated very well from ten-finger movements on a full-sized keyboard to thumb-typing on a touchscreen.

From my perspective as a product designer, I couldn’t have offered Richard anything else that made better use of the knowledge I could expect him to have, based on our shared cultural experience.

From his perspective as a user, no other key arrangement would have been so ...

This set of facts formed a chain linking likabili...

Going beyond the refined-like response leads me to my second aspect of taste:

finding balance.

The development of the touchscreen keyboard is a story of searching for an equilibrium, of ma...

Once these granular decisions are made and are incorporated into a larger system, they no longer stand alone.

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

The design responsibility expands to balancing the many individual refined-like responses against the other side of the taste equation, the attempt t...

My omission of beauty is not a mistake. Making software and products appear beautiful, in the sense of being visually attractive, only goes so far.

Steve Jobs once said, “Design is how it works.”

“Make it look good!”

That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Shallow beauty in products doesn’t serve people. Product design should strive for a depth, for a beauty rooted in what a product does, not merely in how it looks and feels. Form should follow function, even though this might seem like a strange notion for pixels on a screen, but it’s not if you believe the appearance of a product should tell you what it is and how to use it. Objects should explain themselves.

It’s impossible to overstate how much this matters,

The autocorrecting QWERTY keyboard did not sink the iPhone as a product, as did the disappointing handwriting recognition on the Newton.

The opposite happened. Two-thumb typing on a touchscreen is now normal. It’s the default for mobile devices.

Even so, popularity doesn’t equal excellence. A better justification is that people can type on a smartphone QWERTY k...

The keyboard can melt away, it can recede, and when it does, it leaves a space for what...

A properly judged mixture of taste and empathy is the secret formula for making products that are intuitive, eas...

In a development process like the one for the Purple touchscreen keyboard,

progress is rarely steady or constant.

Convergence

was the term we used to describe the final phase of making an Apple product, after the features had been locked down and the programming and design teams spent the last three or four months fixing bugs and polishing details.

The keyboard had to make a what you meant versus what you did choice whenever you tapped the space bar at the end of a word. I had to teach autocorrection to make this choice well.

At the same time, I had to avoid the bizarre results that might make people mistrust the software, since that might lead them to doubt their ability to type text on the touchscreen keyboard and perhaps might cause them to avoid buying our smartphone altogether—just

I had two issues. The first was raising the quality of the dictionary—I needed better data. The second was making full use of all the touch input and language information I had available—I

I needed better algorithms.

I focused on better data and better algorithms as separate tasks, hoping that the distinct threads of improvement...

Making the autocorrection dictionary was an easy-to-understand task in theory, even though it was difficult to perform in practice.

the hard part of making a dictionary was the sheer size of the task.

Yet heading toward the finish line was straightforward. Just keep tuning usage frequency values. Just keep adding words. Just keep going.

This is a basic concept behind autocorrection, finding the best combination of letters given the taps from a typist, the keys that popped up, and considering the letters in the neighborhood of the popped-up key.

Of course, multiple words could be possible for most key sequences,

and this is where the usage frequency value in the dictionary data came into play.

The algorithm worked like this: Arrange typed letters in a set of tumblers with their neighboring letters. Spin the tumblers to check every letter combination. Note the dictionary words found by spinning the tumblers. Sug...

if I missed the exact key I was aiming for, the one I intended to tap was most likely the next closest key, not some other key farther away.

I built the direction of these misses into my algorithm.