Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda
In What if you could learn design from Apple Harvard Business Review article, Mark Bonchek talks about various corporate universities that have programs that rival traditional business schools.
In the book Creative Selection, author Ken Kocienda says "We were too busy focusing on small details. 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". The preface to this thought is about the number of users who use Safari (I liked the tidbit about how it was named similar to Explorer, Konqueror) browser that Kocienda helped develop. 2 billion. When Sophie Wilson, ARM inventor was asked how she feels about billions of people using what she has done, she said "I try not to think about it".
How are such breakthrough products made? This is what you learn as a fly on the wall in the Apple office. Kocienda boils it down to seven essential elements written down nowhere, but always in practice.
Inspiration & Decisiveness to create initial prototypes.
Collaboration, Craft & Taste
Moving forward as a group in a step wise fashion, from problem to design to demo to shipping product and provide feedback
Diligence
Taking each promising concept and trying to come up with ways to make it better
Empathy
In delighting customers as focus
"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 well-chosen thing, to take words and turn them into a vision, and then use the vision to spur the actions which create the results".
Kocienda illustrated the fine points in making rules while solving problems through the cursor, keyboard and autocorrection examples.
Software and Hardware developers will see their daily routine of writing code, adding FIXME, tracking bugs and issues played at Apple too. Even the page load test as a metric to decide between various options and as a minimum requirement.
You could sound scholarly with Donald Ruth's "Premature Optimization is the root of all evil".
As an iphone user, it was fun to know the behind the scenes of some of the features as well as the terminology for the enabling technology.
"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works" - Steve Jobs.
It is exciting to hear from someone who has made it possible to move from hardware keyboard to virtual keyboard.
Knowing that the features that you take for granted were at some point inventions of great minds, the way they would have come up with those ideas and named them is material for goose bumps.
The Oracle, technology to people converters who made this marvel possible.
Seven elements essential to Apple's software success
Studio backlots
Excerpt iphone software keyboard design
This is what its like seeing Steve Jobs show off your work to the world
"Their(Konqueror) software style was the Hemingway to Mozilla's Faulkner."
Porting, FIXME
Seven elements essential to Apple's software success
Studio backlots
Excerpt iphone software keyboard design
This is what its like seeing Steve Jobs show off your work to the world
"Their(Konqueror) software style was the Hemingway to Mozilla's Faulkner."
Porting, FIXME
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" - Donald Knuth— Software Wisdom (@SoftwareWisdom) August 9, 2018
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