Creative Selection Quotes

“At Apple, we never would have dreamed of doing that, and we never staged any A/ B tests for any of the software on the iPhone. When it came to choosing a color, we picked one. We used our good taste—and our knowledge of how to make software accessible to people with visual difficulties related to color perception—and we moved on.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Taste is developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“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.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“We used the word “heuristics” to describe aspects of software development that tip toward the liberal arts. Its counterpart, “algorithms,” was its alter ego on the technical side. Heuristics and algorithms are like two sides of the same coin. Both are specific procedures for making software do what it does: taking input, applying an operation, and producing output. Yet each had a different purpose.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Why do some products, like the iPhone, turn out as well as they do? I’m now ready to offer my complete answer. It comes in three parts.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“it’s crucial to make the right call about whether to use an algorithm or a heuristic in a specific situation. This is why the Google experiment with forty-one shades of blue seems so foreign to me, accustomed as I am to the Apple approach. Google used an A/B test to make a color choice. It used a single predetermined value criterion and defined it like so: The best shade of blue is the one that people clicked most often in the test. This is an algorithm.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Heuristics also have a measurement or value associated with them—the duration for an animation or the red-green-blue values for an onscreen color, but there isn’t a similar “arrow of improvement” that always points the same way. Unlike evaluating algorithms, heuristics are harder to nail down. For instance, how quickly should a scrolling list glide to a stop after you’ve flicked it? We always made demos to evaluate the possibilities.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“This points to the more general lesson I took from my WebKit editing work: People matter more than programming”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“We used algorithms and heuristics like they were the left and right sides of our collective product development brain. Employing each involved an interplay of craft and taste, and we always tried to strike the correct balance. Algorithms and heuristics must coordinate to make a great high-tech product.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“I think Edison’s large-scale success was built on a foundation of tending to small details. I would like to turn the discussion back to how Edison himself described his approach for constructing the foundations for his innovative work, specifically, how he solved problems like finding the best filament material for his lightbulb: “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.”6”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Seeing good work wind up on the cutting room floor was part of the job.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Perhaps the most unnerving and fear-inducing source of anxiety is that your ideas, words, and resulting vision might not be any good to start with and wouldn’t yield success even with a faithful follow-through.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“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.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“A better justification is that people can type on a smartphone QWERTY keyboard without thinking about it. The keyboard can melt away, it can recede, and when it does, it leaves a space for what people really care about.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it [a product] looks like. People think it’s this veneer—that the designers are handed this box and told, “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.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Over time, I came to the conclusion that designing an excellent user experience was as much about preventing negative experiences as facilitating positive ones.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“many coders find it easier to get along with computers than colleagues,”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“When software behavior is mysterious, get more organized.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“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.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“it took committed people to breathe life into these concepts and transform them into a culture.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“This brings me to the third part of my answer. After creative selection and the seven essential elements, we needed one more intersection to make great work: a combination of people and commitment.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Here’s the full list of the seven essential elements”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“The second part of my answer goes back to the introduction, where I first mentioned the seven essential elements of the Apple development”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Whatever it was, the concrete and specific modifications we chose to make led to the actions items that justified making the next demo. Repeat, then repeat again. Doing this over and over again set our projects on the slow path to accumulating positive change. This is how we started with an idea and finished with software for a product.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“The first part is the demo-making creative selection process.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“It was often difficult to decide where an algorithm should end and a heuristic should take over. It usually took us many design and programming iterations to evaluate all the relevant options. The best solutions were an accumulation of small decisions carefully weighed against each other as we sought to tame the complexity of so many compounding and overlapping factors.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“This is what working at the intersection is all about. These examples should clarify why we always made so many demos.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“What was important was that there remained a tension and flow between the algorithms and heuristics—making the correct choices to lean toward technology or liberal arts could be complicated.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“How long should it take for an app icon to animate up from its place on the home screen to fill the entire display? How far should you have to drag your finger on the screen for it to be possible to interpret the touch as a swipe gesture? How much should a two-finger pinch gesture allow you to zoom in on an image in the Photos app? The answers to all of these questions were numbers, and might be 0.35 seconds for the app animation, or 30 pixels for the swipe gesture, or 4x for photo zooming, but the number was never the point. The values themselves weren’t provably better in any engineering sense. Rather, the numbers represented sensible defaults, or pleasing effects, or a way to give people what they meant rather than what they did. It takes effort to find what these things are, which is appropriate, since the etymological root of “heuristic” is eureka, which (of course) comes from the Greek and means “to find.” This is where that word, “eureka,” actually figured into our development process, since good heuristics don’t come in brilliant flashes, but only after patient searches, and it wasn’t always clear to us that we had found the right heuristic even when we had. We arrived at our final decisions only with judgment and time. Heuristics are like this. They’re subjective.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Algorithms produce quantifiable results, where progress is defined by measurements moving in a predetermined direction, as in the case of the nearly yearlong effort to improve the performance of Safari. The Page Load Test reported how our code was doing, and it delivered this result in one number, the average time to load a page. All along, we had a clear goal for this number—to reduce it. This was never in question. Faster times were better.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs