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

by Ken Kocienda

The relation of Diplomacy decision to shipping software also shows how important demos were to us at Apple. Demos served as the primary means to turn ideas into software. The setup of these demo review meetings reveals how we went about making our software great.

demos are really a great way to get feedback and being demo oriented is a great way to get to better products

Decisiveness was crucial throughout. At the pre-Steve level, Scott was the executive editor. He was the “decider.” Every Apple demo review had a decider, the person with the sole authority to approve or not and the prerogative to declare what would happen next.

The need to keep churning out demos that could eventually be shown to Steve meant our day-to-day software development work became a pyramid of demos, reviews, and decisions building up to the top and to Steve’s final judgment.

This push for simplicity had a purpose. Even though he was a high-tech CEO, Steve could put himself in the shoes of customers, people who cared nothing for the ins and outs of the software industry. He never wanted Apple software to overload people, especially when they might already be stretched by the bustle of their everyday lives.

In the same way, software demos need to be convincing enough to explore an idea, to communicate a step toward making a product, even though the demo is not the product itself. Like the movie, demos should be specifically choreographed, so it’s clear what must be included and what can be left out.

When I make a demo, I think about the intended audience, and I make a specific decision about what features to include. I draw a conceptual ring around those key details, and I use a thick imaginary marker to do it.

I leave outside the ring other less important details that will eventually have to be addressed, but not immediately. I pay them as little attention as possible. Like the inside of the hat shop, I omit them from the demo if I can get away with it.

I know the demo isn’t an actual product, and my audience knows it too, but creating the illusion of an actual product is essential during the development process to maintain the vision of what we’re actually trying to achieve, and so my colleagues can begin responding and giving feedback as if the demo was the product.

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

In any complex effort, communicating a well-articulated vision for what you’re trying to do is the starting point for figuring out how to do it.

to take words and turn them into a vision, and then use the vision to spur the actions that create the results.

If Apple was going to deliver it, someone had to “sign up” for the work and get it done.

It represented an important technical insight: When software behavior is mysterious, get more organized.

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”1

🔁🌀💖

The field was wide open, so, when any of us had a new concept for a keyboard, we made a demo to communicate what we were thinking. Literally, we had to demonstrate our idea.

We always started small, with some inspiration. We made demos. We mixed in feedback. We listened to guidance from smart colleagues. We blended in variations. We honed our vision. We followed the initial demo with another and then another. We improved our demos in incremental steps. We evolved our work by slowly converging on better versions of the vision. Round after round of creative selection moved us step by step from the spark of an idea to a finished product.

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.

A small group of passionate, talented, imaginative, ingenious, ever-curious people built a work culture based on applying their inspiration and collaboration with diligence, craft, decisiveness, taste, and empathy and, through a lengthy progression of demo-feedback sessions, repeatedly tuned and optimized heuristics and algorithms, persisted through doubts and setbacks, selected the most promising bits of progress at every step, all with the goal of creating the best products possible.