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

by Ken Kocienda

You could build and release products without ever living on them to see if they’re any good, as we did with Nautilus and our online services at Eazel. You could hold demo meetings and then adjourn them without deciding what to do next, a mistake that interrupts the chain of criticism that provides the logical connection from demo to demo. You could assign oversized project teams to the tasks one or two people could handle, a fault that can lead to muddled communications and a dilution of each person’s ability to make a difference. You could have conflicting lines of authority and fail to ever reach universally recognized final decisions. You could design for looks, or for fashion, or for some abstract ideal instead of designing for how a product works. You could stage A/B tests to help make simple decisions, as was done, apparently, to choose colors at Google.