Creative Selection Quotes

“When Scott asked me to cut a feature like the suggestion bar, it didn’t make me grumpy, even though I had been working hard on the feature for over a year. As Apple product developers, we were always happy to improve our user experiences by lightening the load of our software.**”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

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

“It’s a fact that our working memory has hard limits, and there has been decades of study to understand the bounds of our cognitive capabilities, extending back to the psychology paper titled The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“The software design group at Apple called itself Human Interface for a reason. Humans were the focus,”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, to be able to get the best of both, to make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive, easy to use, fun to use, so that they really fit the users. The users don’t have to come to them, they come to the user.2”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“The Intersection,” the title of this chapter, was an idea that helped us. It speaks to the way Apple valued expertise in both technology and liberal arts. We used this notion to guide our efforts as we developed and lived on our gadgets, so that they turned out to be more than an agglomeration of the latest CPUs, sensors, and software manufactured at scale. We hoped to make our products meaningful and useful to people.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“We managed to steer clear of all such pitfalls. If I were to take a stab at explaining the why, I would say that our clarity of purpose kept us on track, in much the same way that Vince Lombardi won football games and Steve Jobs pushed us to make a speedy first version of Safari. Since our focus on making great products never wavered—if for no other reason than that’s what Steve demanded—perhaps concentrating keenly on what to do helped us to block out what not to do.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“We didn’t establish large, cutting-edge software research departments sequestered from, and with a tenuous connection to, the designers and engineers responsible for creating and shipping the real products.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“We didn’t have an imbalance between influence and involvement, where a senior leader might try to mimic the commanding role of Steve Jobs without the corresponding level of personal engagement. Detached high-level managers making all the key decisions is such a widespread affliction that it has its own internet meme, the Seagull Manager.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“There are innumerable ways creative selection can become bogged down, since this working method must be applied consistently over a period of time to yield results. Consequently, our success was as much about what we didn’t do as what we did. Mostly we avoided falling into any of the typical product development traps common in Silicon Valley and that, I expect, occur often in other kinds of creative organizations and businesses. For example, we didn’t take two-hour coffee breaks or hold daylong offsite confabs to talk about projects without examples to ground the discussion—we didn’t have lengthy discussions about whose imaginary puppy was cuter. We didn’t shuffle around printed specifications or unchanging paper mock-ups for weeks on end, waiting for an epiphany that would jump us directly from an early-stage concept to a complete product design, hoping we could somehow flip the ratio of inspiration to perspiration Thomas Edison spoke about, the relationship between the time it takes to get an idea and the amount of hard work it takes to transform that idea into something real.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“With our Darwinian demo methodology, we had a huge advantage over artificially selecting breeders and the glacially slow accumulations of genetic improvements that drive natural selection. Working in software meant we could move fast. We could make changes whenever we wanted, and we did. We created new demos that were concretely and specifically targeted to be better than the previous one. We constructed Hollywood backlots around these demos to provide context and to help us suspend our disbelief about the often nonexistent system surrounding the feature or app that was the focus of our attention. We gave each other feedback, both as initial impressions and after living on the software to test the viability of the ideas and quality of the associated implementations. We gathered up action items for the next iteration, and then we forged ahead toward the next demo. I’ve given a name to this continuing progression of demo -> feedback -> next demo: creative selection.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“The concrete and specific demos I described in chapter 6 were catalysts for creative decisions. They forced us to make judgments about what was good, what needed changes or improvements, and what should be deleted. We habitually converged on demos, then we allowed demo feedback to cause a fresh divergence, one that we immediately sought to close for the follow-on demo.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Such drama was uncommon, for me, for Kim, and for the rest of us. Usually we kept the rate of our progress above the level of our stress, mostly because we hit few roadblocks that wouldn’t give way to a good idea.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“In the end, these tech talks inspired me more than they directly informed my algorithms. Honestly, much of the math they described was beyond me. I’m not an engineer by training—in fact, I never took a single math course in college. If there ever was an argument that I should have kept studying the subject beyond high school because there was no telling when I might need it, this was it. I was in over my head. Yet I wasn’t completely lost. When Richard Williamson joined Apple and helped us determine the technical direction for our web browser project, he showed that it was possible to make technical headway by skipping past the problems he couldn’t solve in favor of those he could. So, that’s what I did.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Over time, I decided many different data sets merited inclusion: sports team and stadium names, city names, product names, chat slang, abbreviations, and more. The autocorrection dictionary was less an academic linguistics exercise and more a catalog of contemporary life. My Purple colleagues wanted to type the words that came up in their typical day, in their typical speech, and in their typical texting taunts of friends while watching ballgames on TV:”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“popularity doesn’t equal excellence. 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. A properly judged mixture of taste and empathy is the secret formula for making products that are intuitive, easy to use, and easy to live with.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“as part of a 2003 New York Times interview discussing the iPod, Steve drove his point home: 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.7 His message is clear, and I agree with it. Shallow beauty in products doesn’t serve people. Product design should strive for a depth, for a beauty rooted in what a product does, not merely in how it looks and feels. Form should follow function, even though this might seem like a strange notion for pixels on a screen, but it’s not if you believe the appearance of a product should tell you what it is and how to use it. Objects should explain themselves.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“At Apple, we sought to be as empathetic as possible in both the initial and the ongoing experiences with a product, but we realized we couldn’t try everything during our design and development phase. We needed to whittle down the unbounded possibilities for how a product might look and behave, and to do this, we used our design and technological taste.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“We could have chosen any key arrangement we wanted for Purple, and perhaps we missed a golden opportunity at the advent of touchscreen typing. We could have banished QWERTY forever. Yet this assumes QWERTY is bad. It isn’t, and the reasons have to do with how taste and empathy combine with craft to make a technology like a software keyboard.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“One legend swirls more persistently around the QWERTY design than all others: how its inventor developed the arrangement to slow down typists. This is correct, as far as it goes, but it focuses on the wrong thing. Given the limits of nineteenth-century technology and the need for a complex scheme to actuate a series of metallic keys to strike a page, a major problem was developing a system where the keys didn’t jam. The time it took to clear key jams was the real bane of speedy typists, so QWERTY was an excellent compromise between an efficient key arrangement for people’s fingers and the need for a typing apparatus to whirl and clack. The QWERTY layout actually helped people type faster.4”
― 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. It couldn’t be an even trade-off either. Great products make people happy almost all the time and do the opposite rarely, if at all.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Since Richard Williamson’s office was right next to mine, I often poked my head around his door, called him into my office, and invited him to pick up the Wallaby so he could try my latest ideas. He always gave specific feedback. More words in the dictionary—good. Word hint on the space bar—not so good. This kind of collaboration was common. The programmers and designers on the Purple project were in and out of each other’s offices all the time. We exchanged frequent feedback on our work, and all of us were expected to field questions on our specific area of development.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Convergence was the term we used to describe the final phase of making an Apple product, after the features had been locked down and the programming and design teams spent the last three or four months fixing bugs and polishing details.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Exactly how we collaborated mattered, and for us on the Purple project, it reduced to a basic idea: We showed demos to each other. Every major feature on the iPhone started as a demo, and for a demo to be useful to us, it had to be concrete and specific. We needed concrete and specific demos to guide our work, since even an unsophisticated idea is hard to discuss constructively without an artifact to illustrate it.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Even when demos went well, there was always a steady flow of feedback, suggestions for changes, impressions on how the software might behave differently. Everyone spoke up. Demos were an open forum for exchanging ideas about how an interaction might look or function better. When demos went poorly, as sometimes happened, there was the same stream of comments and constructive criticism. There was never any finger-pointing; however, there was an expectation that new demos would include a response to the feedback from previous demos. This was the one essential demo expectation: progress.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“I liked the people on my new team, and sync was technically challenging, but very soon, I was miserable in my new job. Why? Mostly because I was unprepared for the change in my daily routine. I went from writing software every day to worrying about my team. My schedule was always full of meetings. I had to navigate cross-functional relationships with other teams related to sync, and that involved much more politicking than I was expecting or was used to. I hadn’t realized how much I relied on writing code to feel productive and happy. My programming skill suddenly didn’t matter, and I didn’t have an intuitive sense for what I needed to do to be successful as a manager. I had taken the job for the wrong reason. It was my poorly judged attempt to make up for the missed management opportunity on Safari.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

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

“I had succeeded in getting my colleagues invested in my insertion point behavior work, not just by asking for their help in a single meeting and saying thanks when it was finished but by demonstrating through my ongoing actions in code changes, demo reviews, and lunchtime chats that their advice had mattered to me. Getting the insertion point to behave correctly wasn’t just my project anymore. It was now our project.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“they told me that I should clean up my code. Over months, as I struggled, I had scattered special-case insertion point functions throughout my project. They told me that was a mistake, but their specific software prescription—to gather the code back together into a single C++ class, which they proposed we call VisiblePosition—was about more than tidiness. It represented an important technical insight: When software behavior is mysterious, get more organized. My insertion point code needed to be as businesslike as a baker looking at a properly filled out order form to determine the correct words to write on a cake.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“When I look back from our technology work to the coaching of Vince Lombardi, I see in his approach to football the same pursuit of clarity and perfection that we sought in our effort to make products at Apple. With his single-minded emphasis on the Power Sweep, and with the success the Packers enjoyed as a result, Vince Lombardi was the Steve Jobs of football coaches. Lombardi connected his words and his team’s actions in football by focusing on one simple play, while at Apple, with our single-minded emphasis on never making the browser slower, we connected our words and actions in software by focusing on one simple rule.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs