Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs
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If you want to know what it was like to give a demo to Steve Jobs, or why the iPhone touchscreen keyboard turned out the way it did, or what made Apple’s product culture special, read on.
Sanjay Krishna liked this
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Every day at Apple was like going to school, a design-focused, high-tech, product-creation university, an immersion program where the next exam was always around the corner.
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1. Inspiration: Thinking big ideas and imagining what might be possible 2. Collaboration: Working together well with other people and seeking to combine your complementary strengths 3. Craft: Applying skill to achieve high-quality results and always striving to do better 4. Diligence: Doing the necessary grunt work and never resorting to shortcuts or half measures 5. Decisiveness: Making tough choices and refusing to delay or procrastinate 6. Taste: Developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole 7. Empathy: Trying to see the world ...more
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On the contrary, we felt, on an instinctive level, that imposing a fixed methodology might snuff out the innovation we were seeking.
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you’ll see that working in the Apple style is not a matter of following a checklist.
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Instead, we moved forward, as a group, in stepwise fashion, from problem to design to demo to shipping product, taking each promising concept and trying to come up with ways to make it better.
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we always added in a personal touch, a little piece of ourselves, an octessence, and by putting together our goals and ideas and efforts and elements and molecules and personal touches, we formed our approach, an approach I call creative selection.
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He seemed to know that applying pressure on me wouldn’t help me figure out the fix for the bug any faster but that I would drop whatever I was doing and get right on it. In his way, Henri filled a role created by the personality of our intense CEO.
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to meld technology and the liberal arts, to take the latest software and hardware advances, mix them with elements of design and culture, and produce features and products that people found useful and meaningful in their everyday lives.
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Bas created inertial scrolling, the system of finger swiping that speeds up as you scroll repeatedly, glides to a rest when you stop touching the screen, and pleasantly bounces at the end of the list. All of us take this behavior for granted today only because Bas’s solution so clearly matched our sense for how this interaction should behave.
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We breezed through our pre-Steve review, largely as a result of Bas’s ability to tell the story of the software through the zoom animation he’d designed.
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His eyes met mine. Over the years, many people have commented on Steve’s special ability to tell you something, whatever it was, no matter how implausible, and make you believe it.
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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.
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Steve found the time to attend a demo review so he could see it. His involvement kept the progress and momentum going.
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From what I could tell, Steve judged him in part on whom he chose to bring.
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In our case, Steve saw something he liked, but he found the demo unnecessarily complicated, so he unpacked it. This deconstruction wasn’t typical, but it was completely in character.
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After that, Steve looked carefully at the software and asked me succinct questions to see if the work could be made simpler.
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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.
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He believed that stripping away nonessential features made products easier for people to learn from the start and easier to use over time.
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Steve figured that the best way to answer difficult questions like these was to avoid the need to ask them.
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Bas never expressed any disappointment over his zoom animation getting deleted either. Seeing good work wind up on the cutting room floor was part of the job.
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Steve’s constant demand to see a succession of demos spawned numerous other demos, each with their own presenters and deciders.
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Demos were fundamental to our work at Apple. We used them to highlight the potential, explore the concepts, show the progress, prompt the discussion, and drive the decisions for making our products.
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All of a sudden, Netscape needed a new strategy if it hoped to remain relevant in the web browser market it helped to create. As its countermove, Netscape decided to publish its browser source code, in the hope that the freely available code might become the de facto standard for all internet-enabled apps. If it did, this might lead to technical support contracts, consulting deals, and other ways of making money not directly tied to web browsers.
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Steve and Scott were keen to keep this momentum going, and since they believed the internet would be an important part of the future of computing, communication, and commerce, they wanted Apple to control its own destiny in this burgeoning technology domain.
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Richard told us he’d made a shim, a software translation layer that tricked the Konqueror browser into thinking it was running on a Linux computer, and then cajoled the computer into believing the browser was a program custom-tailored to the Mac.
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Just a shim, two clever shortcuts, and two days to produce a working browser demo. Richard’s quick results were evidence of a deep vein of potential in Konqueror, one we could explore, mine, and exploit.
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He began by quizzing us on the browser analysis we had done before his arrival, and after hearing it, he quickly discarded our effort with Mozilla as unlikely to bear fruit.
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At Eazel, we had never considered anything like the quick get-it-done schemes Richard just showed us.
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Were other lampposts on the backlot similarly well built? We don’t know, but again, we don’t care. Maybe they were, and maybe they weren’t, but the set designers needed to make sure that one specific lamppost was sufficiently sturdy for the movie’s lead character to leap up onto it.
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It had to be built well because the choreography called for it.
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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. Those things that aren’t the main focus of a demo, but are required to create the proper setting, must be realized at the correct level of detail so they contribute to the whole rather than detract from the vision.
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Those aspects were essential. The font rendering was not to Apple standards—some characters were jaggy rather than smooth—but text was legible enough, so Richard expended no more effort on typography. He spent no time at all on irrelevant details, like keyboard shortcuts or a beautifully designed app icon. He chose this combination of important/passable/ignorable features carefully to maximize impact, minimize distractions, and fit the work schedule he’d set for himself.
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leave outside the ring other less important details that will eventually have to be addressed, but not immediately.
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I want my demo audience to think they’re looking at something real, even though they aren’t. 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.
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Over time, Don and I began to understand and absorb the model Richard showed us. Look for ways to make quick progress. Watch for project stalls that might indicate a lack of potential. Cut corners to skip unnecessary effort. Remove distractions to focus attention where it needs to be. Start approximating your end goal as soon as possible. Maximize the impact of your most difficult effort. Combine inspiration, decisiveness, and craft to make demos.
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Linux said “lorry” where the Mac said “truck.”
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Their software style was the Hemingway to Mozilla’s Faulkner.
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“None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.”
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I agree with Edison. Ideas are nothing without the hard work to make them real.
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We weren’t a family, but we were a close-knit team.
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PLT was finished, Don declared, our browser would become faster by never getting slower. It was his Zen koan.
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Three weeks or a month before the keynote itself, Steve would start rehearsing with portions of his slide deck in some venue at Apple, often in Town Hall, the auditorium on the Infinite Loop campus. Slowly, day by day, he would build the show by stepping through it as he wanted to present it at the keynote.
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This was one of Steve’s great secrets of success as a presenter. He practiced. A lot. He went over and over the material until he had the presentation honed, and he knew it cold.
Sanjay Krishna
Nice
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“Gentlemen,” he said, “we have a great deal of ground to cover. We’re going to do things a lot differently than they’ve been done here before . . . [We’re] going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because perfection is not attainable. But we are going to relentlessly chase it because, in the process, we will catch excellence.”
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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.
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but a significant part of attaining excellence in any field is closing the gap between the accidental and intentional, to achieve not just a something or even an everything but a specific and well-chosen thing, to take words and turn them into a vision, and then use the vision to spur the actions that create the results.
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we connected our words and actions in software by focusing on one simple rule.
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These subsequent interactions had an effect I didn’t expect. Once it was clear to Darin and Trey that their advice was leading to obvious improvements in my code, they appeared to like it. Even though the technical work to make the insertion point behave better was still my responsibility, they could share in the turnaround they helped bring about.
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“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
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