listening,” said Hoddie.
After several weeks of playing around with different designs, Wasko came up with a metallic look, which Jobs liked but thought wasn’t quite right. At the next meeting Jobs showed up with a brochure from Hewlett-Packard with the HP logo in brushed metal, resembling a high-end kitchen appliance. “I like this one,” Jobs told the group. “See what you can do.”
The team came back with a brushed-metal look for the QuickTime player, which for several years since became the predominant design motif used extensively across Apple’s software plus its high-end hardware. Through the early 2000s, most of Apple’s applications were given a brushed-metal look, from the Safari web browser to the iCal calendar.
Jobs is intimately involved in the design process. He brings a lot of ideas to the table and always makes suggestions for improving designs. Jobs’s contribution is not just choosing what he likes and dislikes. “He’s not, ‘this is bad, this is good,’ ” said Hoddie. “He’s really part of the design.”
Deceptive Simplicity
Jobs is never interested in technology for technology’s sake. He never loads up on bells and whistles, cramming features into a product simply because they’re easy to add. Just the opposite. Jobs pares back the complexity of his products until they are as simple and easy to use as possible. Lots of Apple’s products are designed from the user’s point of view.
Take the iTunes online music store, which launched in 2001, at the height of the popularity of online file sharing. A lot of people asked at the time how the store would compete with piracy. Why would anyone spend $1 a song, when they could get the same song for free? Jobs’s answer was the “customer experience.” Instead of wasting time on the file-sharing networks, trying to find songs, music fans could log on to iTunes and buy songs with a single click. They’re guaranteed quality and reliability, with the ease of one-click shopping. “We don’t see how you convince people to stop being thieves, unless you can offer them a carrot—not just a stick,” Jobs said. “And the carrot is: We’re gonna offer you a better experience ... and it’s only gonna cost you a dollar a song.” 3
Jobs is extremely customer-centric. In interviews, Jobs has said the starting point for the iPod wasn’t a small hard drive or a new chip, but the user experience. “Steve made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content,” Jonny Ive said about the iPod. “It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device—which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren’t obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.” 4
One of the most important parts of Apple’s design process is simplification. The simplicity of Apple’s products stems from choices being taken away from the customer. For Jobs, less is always more. “As technology becomes more complex, Apple’s core strength of knowing how to make very sophisticated technology comprehensible to mere mortals is in even greater demand,” he told the Times . 5
John Sculley, Apple’s CEO from 1983 to 1993, said Jobs concentrated as much on what was left out as on the stuff that was included. “What makes Steve’s methodology different than everybody else’s is that he always believed that the most important decisions you make are not the things that you do, but the things you decide not to do,” Sculley told me. 6
A study by Elke den Ouden of the Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands found that nearly half of the products returned by consumers for refunds are in perfect working order, but their new owners couldn’t figure out how to use them. She discovered that the average American consumer will fumble with a new device for only twenty minutes before giving up and returning it to the store. This was
After several weeks of playing around with different designs, Wasko came up with a metallic look, which Jobs liked but thought wasn’t quite right. At the next meeting Jobs showed up with a brochure from Hewlett-Packard with the HP logo in brushed metal, resembling a high-end kitchen appliance. “I like this one,” Jobs told the group. “See what you can do.”
The team came back with a brushed-metal look for the QuickTime player, which for several years since became the predominant design motif used extensively across Apple’s software plus its high-end hardware. Through the early 2000s, most of Apple’s applications were given a brushed-metal look, from the Safari web browser to the iCal calendar.
Jobs is intimately involved in the design process. He brings a lot of ideas to the table and always makes suggestions for improving designs. Jobs’s contribution is not just choosing what he likes and dislikes. “He’s not, ‘this is bad, this is good,’ ” said Hoddie. “He’s really part of the design.”
Deceptive Simplicity
Jobs is never interested in technology for technology’s sake. He never loads up on bells and whistles, cramming features into a product simply because they’re easy to add. Just the opposite. Jobs pares back the complexity of his products until they are as simple and easy to use as possible. Lots of Apple’s products are designed from the user’s point of view.
Take the iTunes online music store, which launched in 2001, at the height of the popularity of online file sharing. A lot of people asked at the time how the store would compete with piracy. Why would anyone spend $1 a song, when they could get the same song for free? Jobs’s answer was the “customer experience.” Instead of wasting time on the file-sharing networks, trying to find songs, music fans could log on to iTunes and buy songs with a single click. They’re guaranteed quality and reliability, with the ease of one-click shopping. “We don’t see how you convince people to stop being thieves, unless you can offer them a carrot—not just a stick,” Jobs said. “And the carrot is: We’re gonna offer you a better experience ... and it’s only gonna cost you a dollar a song.” 3
Jobs is extremely customer-centric. In interviews, Jobs has said the starting point for the iPod wasn’t a small hard drive or a new chip, but the user experience. “Steve made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content,” Jonny Ive said about the iPod. “It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device—which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren’t obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.” 4
One of the most important parts of Apple’s design process is simplification. The simplicity of Apple’s products stems from choices being taken away from the customer. For Jobs, less is always more. “As technology becomes more complex, Apple’s core strength of knowing how to make very sophisticated technology comprehensible to mere mortals is in even greater demand,” he told the Times . 5
John Sculley, Apple’s CEO from 1983 to 1993, said Jobs concentrated as much on what was left out as on the stuff that was included. “What makes Steve’s methodology different than everybody else’s is that he always believed that the most important decisions you make are not the things that you do, but the things you decide not to do,” Sculley told me. 6
A study by Elke den Ouden of the Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands found that nearly half of the products returned by consumers for refunds are in perfect working order, but their new owners couldn’t figure out how to use them. She discovered that the average American consumer will fumble with a new device for only twenty minutes before giving up and returning it to the store. This was
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