Sometimes the system worked well, but the window often had to be resized to display different kinds of documents. When working with a text document, the window was best made thin and narrow to make it easy to scroll up and down the text. But if the user opened an image in landscape format, the window would have to be widened.
But this wasn’t the biggest problem. Critically for Jobs, the system required the designers to create a dedicated button in the window toolbar to switch it on and off. Jobs decided, in the interest of simplicity, to take the button away. He could live with resizing windows, but not the additional button cluttering the menu bar. “The extra button wasn’t justified by the functionality,” Ratzlaff said.
While working on the new interface, Jobs would sometimes suggest what at first seemed to be crazy ideas, but later turned out to be good ones. At one meeting, he was scrutinizing the three tiny buttons in the top left corner of every window. The three buttons were for closing, shrinking, and expanding the window, respectively. The designers had made all the buttons the same muted gray, to prevent them from distracting the user, but it was difficult to tell what the buttons were for. It was suggested that their functions should be illustrated by an animation that was triggered when the mouse cursor hovered over them.
But then Jobs made what seemed like an odd suggestion: that the buttons should be colored like traffic stoplights: red to close the window, yellow to shrink it, and green to expand it. “When we heard that, we felt that was a strange thing to associate with a computer,” Ratzlaff said. “But we worked on it for a little while and he was right.” The color of the button implicitly suggested the consequence of clicking it, especially the red button, which suggested “danger” if the user clicked it but didn’t mean to close the window.
Introducing OS X
Jobs knew that OS X would cause a huge outcry from Apple’s outside software developers, who would have to rewrite all their software to run on the new system. Even with OS X’s great programming tools, there would be pushback from developers. Jobs and his executives struggled with the best way to approach the software community. Eventually they came up with a strategy: if they could persuade just three of the biggest companies to embrace OS X, everyone else would follow. The big three were Microsoft, Adobe, and Macromedia.
It worked—eventually. Microsoft supported OS X from the get-go, thanks to Jobs’s 1998 deal with Bill Gates that cemented five years of software support. But Adobe and Macromedia weren’t so quick to convert their big applications like Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Both companies eventually ported them over, but they refused to rewrite their consumer applications for OS X, a decision that led Apple to develop its own application software and, indirectly, the iPod (more on this later).
While it was no secret Apple was working on OS X, the fact that it had a new interface was. The interface was designed in intense secrecy. Very few people at Apple even knew the interface was being overhauled, only the handful of people working on it. One of Jobs’s stated rationales for keeping it secret was to prevent others—Microsoft in particular—from copying it.
But more important, Jobs didn’t want to kill sales of the current Macintosh operating system. Jobs wanted to avoid what’s known as the Osborne effect, where a company commits suicide by announcing cool technology still under development.
As soon as OS X development started, Jobs directed everyone at Apple to stop criticizing the current Mac OS in public. For years, Apple’s programmers had been quite frank about the system’s problems and shortcomings. “Mac OS X was his baby, so he knew how great it was,” said Peter Hoddie. “But he said for the next few years we’ve got to focus on Mac OS because we’ll never get there without it. He was like Khrushchev, banging his shoe on the table. ‘You’ve got to support the Mac OS, kids. Get this through your heads.’”2
Jobs unveiled Mac OS X in January 2000 at Macworld, after nearly two and a half years of work by nearly one thousand programmers. Mac OS X was a colossal undertaking. It was— and arguably still is—the most sophisticated computer interface designed to date, with complex, real-time graphics effects like transparency, shadowing, and animation. But it had to run on every G3 processor Apple had on the market, and it had to run in as little as 8 Mbytes of video memory. It was a very tall order.
While introducing OS X at Macworld, Jobs also announced that he was becoming Apple’s permanent CEO, which drew huge applause from the keynote crowd. Several Apple employees have noted that Jobs didn’t become the company’s permanent CEO until after OS X shipped in March 2001. By this point, Jobs had been at Apple’s helm for two and a half years, and had replaced almost all the directors and senior staff, fixed marketing and advertising, reinvigorated hardware with the iMac, and reorganized sales. Ratzlaff noted that with OS X, Jobs had overhauled the company and all of Apple’s major products. “He was waiting for the last big parts of the company to be running to his standards before he took on the role of Apple CEO,” said Ratzlaff.
Jobs’s Design Process
For many years, Apple encouraged strict adherence to its Human Interface Guidelines, a standards bible designed to ensure a consistent user experience across software applications. The HIG told designers where to put menus, what kind of commands they should contain, and how to design dialog boxes. The idea was that all Mac software would behave alike, no matter which company it came from.
The guidelines were first drafted in the 1980s, when computers were used primarily to produce things, such as creating and printing out documents. But in the Internet age, computers are used for communication and media consumption as much as they are for printing documents and editing video. Software for playing movies or videoconferencing with friends can be much simpler than applications like Photoshop or Excel. Often, only a few functions are required, and all the dropdown menus and dialog boxes can be jettisoned in favor of a few simple buttons. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a steady shift toward single-purpose mini-applications in both Mac (Widgets) and Windows (Gadgets).
Apple’s QuickTime player was an early example of software that benefited from an interface rethink. Used to play multimedia files, mostly music and video, the player needed only a few controls for starting and pausing movies and adjusting the sound. It was decided that the QuickTime player should be one of the first pieces of Apple’s software to get a simple appliance-like interface.
The player’s interface was designed by Tim Wasko, a soft-spoken Canadian who later went on to design the iPod interface. Wasko came to Apple from NeXT, where he’d worked with Jobs. Wasko is known at Apple as a design god. “He’s a total fiend at Photoshop,” said Hoddie. “You’d say, ‘What about this idea?’ and it’d be: click click, click”—Hoddie mimicked the sound of fingers flying across a keyboard—“and it was rendered already.”
The QuickTime player design team was made up of half a dozen designers and programmers, including Hoddie and Wasko. They met with Jobs once or twice a week over six months. Each week, the team would present a dozen or more new designs, often playing around with different textures and looks. Early ideas included a yellow plastic motif inspired by Sony’s Sport Walkman, and various wood or metal textures. Anything was game. “Steve is not a design radical, but he is willing to try new things,” said Hoddie.
At first, the designs were presented on a computer, but the team found that flashing them on and off screen was a laborious process, so they switched to printing out the designs on large glossy sheets of paper. The printouts were spread over a large conference table and could be quickly sorted through. Jobs and the designers found it easy to pick out the designs they liked from the pile, saying this texture should go with that shape. The method proved to be so effective that most of Apple’s designers have since adopted it.
After the meetings, Jobs would sometimes take away a handful of printouts and show them to other people. “He has great design sense, but he’s also listening,” said Hoddie.
After several weeks of playing around wi
th 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 true of cell phones, DVD players, and MP3 players. More surprisingly, she asked several managers from Philips (the Dutch electronics giant is one of her clients) to take home a handful of products and use them over the weekend. The managers, most of them tech savvy, failed to get the products to work. “Product developers, brought in to witness the struggles of average consumers, were astounded by the havoc they created,” she wrote.
Den Ouden concluded that the products had been poorly defined in the early design stage: no one had clearly articulated what the product’s primary function was to be. As a result, designers heaped on the features and capabilities until the products became a confusing mess. This is an all too common story in consumer electronics and software design. Engineers tend to create products that only they themselves can understand. Witness early MP3 players like Creatives’ Nomad Jukebox, which had an inscrutable interface that only a nerd could love.
Many consumer electronics products are designed with the notion that more features mean better value. Engineers are often pressured to add features to new versions of their products, which are marketed as “new and improved.” A lot of this feature creep is driven by consumer expectations. Newer models are expected to have new capabilities; otherwise, where’s the incentive to upgrade? Plus, customers tend to look for devices with the most features. More features equal better value. Apple tries to resist this. The first iPod had the hardware for FM radio and voice recording, but these features were not implemented, lest they complicate the device. “What’s interesting is that out of that simplicity, an almost ... unashamed sense of simplicity, and expressing it, came a very different product,” Ive said. “But difference wasn’t the goal. It’s actually very easy to create a different thing. What was exciting is starting to realize that its difference was really a consequence of this quest to make it a very simple thing.”
A lot of companies like to say they’re customer-centric. They approach their users and ask them what they want. This so-called user-centric innovation is driven by feedback and focus groups. But Jobs shuns laborious studies of users locked in a conference room. He plays with the new technology himself, noting his own reactions to it, which is given as feedback to his engineers. If something is too hard to use, Jobs gives instructions for it to be simplified. Anything that is unnecessary or confusing is to be removed. If it works for him, it’ll work for Apple’s customers.
John Sculley told me that Jobs always focused on the user experience. “He always looked at things from the perspective of what was the users experience going to be,” Sculley said. “But unlike a lot of people in product marketing in those days who would go out and do consumer testing, asking people what they wanted, Steve didn’t believe in that. He said, ‘How can I possibly ask someone what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphics-based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.’ ”7
Creativity in art and technology is about individual expression. Just as an artist couldn’t produce a painting by conducting a focus group, Jobs doesn’t use them either. Jobs can’t innovate by asking a focus group what they want—they don’t know what they want. Like Henry Ford once said: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”
Patrick Whitney, director of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design, the United States’s biggest graduate school of design, said user groups aren’t suited to technology innovation. Traditionally, the tech industry has conducted carefully controlled studies on new products, especially interfaces. These Human Computer Interaction studies are usually conducted after a product has been designed, to see what works as anticipated and what needs refining. By definition, these studies need users who are unfamiliar with the technology, or they will skew the study. “User groups need naïve users,” Whitney explained. “But these users can’t tell you what they want. You have to watch them to discover what they want.”
Whitney said Sony would never have invented the Walkman if it had listened to its users. The company actually conducted a lot of research before releasing it. “All the marketing data said the Walkman was going to fail. It was unambiguous. No one would buy it. But [founder Akio] Marita pushed it through anyway. He knew. Jobs is the same. He has no need for user groups because he is a user experience expert.”8
“We have a lot of customers, and we have a
lot of research into our installed base,” Jobs told Business Week. “We also watch industry trends pretty carefully. But in the end, for something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”9
Jobs is Apple’s one-man focus group. One of his great strengths is that he’s not an engineer. Jobs has no formal training in engineering or programming. He doesn’t have a business degree. In fact, he doesn’t have a degree at all. He’s a college dropout. Jobs doesn’t think like an engineer. He thinks like a layman, which makes him the perfect test bed for Apple’s products. He is Apple’s Everyman, the ideal Apple customer. “Technically he’s at the serious hobbyist level,” said Dag Spicer, a senior curator with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. “He had no formal training, but he’s followed technology since a teenager. He’s technically aware enough to follow trends, like a good stock analyst. He has a layman’s view. It’s a great as set.”10
Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s former chief evangelist, told me that the budge at Apple for focus groups and market research is a negative number—and he was only slightly exaggerating. Apple, like most corporations, does spend money on researching its customers, but Jobs certainly doesn’t poll users when developing new products. “Steve Jobs doesn’t do market research,” Kawasaki said. “Market research for Steve Jobs is the right hemisphere talks to the left hemisphere.”11
Inside Steve's Brain Page 5
