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

by Ken Kocienda

Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information, published by George A. Miller of Harvard University in 1956.

Interacting with technology, especially when it’s new or tricky, creates the same kind of burden as my listing quiz. We soon hit our mental boundaries, and it doesn’t take much to knock our minds off course when we’re navigating in a sea of complexity. We can easily get lost in software features, and if that happens, we don’t have enough intellectual capacity to find solid ground and focus on what we’re actually trying to do.

To make products more approachable, designers must lighten the load on people trying to use the things they make. Even small simplifications make a difference. The good news is that I think it’s almost always possible to streamline tasks to make them less taxing.

suggestion bar was less of an aid and more of a distraction, so he had me get rid of it.

As Apple product developers, we were always happy to improve our user experiences by lightening the load of our software.*

patents are not written to put smiles on people’s faces.

Our goal was comfortable technology and computer-enabled liberal arts, a combination of both.

At Apple, we never considered the notion of an algorithmically correct color. We used demos to pick colors and animation timings, and we put our faith in our sense of taste.

Steve looked over to us, and he recognized Richard immediately and thanked him.

A small group of people built a work culture based on applying the seven essential elements through an ongoing process of creative selection.

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.