Bagonca

Last night, I was reading a book by Leander Kahney. It is called “Inside Steve’s Brain”. I was mostly inspired to buy the book because of Google Story, the other book that I read some weeks back. Though both the books cannot be compared, to be honest I think this book lacks the flow. The author just wanders all around. Seems like it is just a collection of all news articles over a decade collected into one book with absolutely no concurrency. I was kind of cheated by the title in plain words. I was expecting the author to have had at least some kind of personal talk with Steve Jobs…at least a jovial walk with Steve on the streets of Palo Alto. Anyway, this blog is not intended to be a critic of the book. I think there are some good take-aways in there. Below is one of them…

Though not very surprising, it was interesting to read how much time Apple spends on the design of each and every little component from hardware to software to packaging. I was amazed to read that Steve and his bunch of talented designers were designing just the scrollbar function of Mac OS X for many weeks.No wonder why Microsoft’s scrollbars sucks when you compare it with OS X. For Apple “no detail is too small”.

Steve on the Mac OS X release said “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them”. Very true indeed! :-)

One thing that intrigues me is how much detail oriented Apple as a company really is. I think the way their designers apply common world solutions for solving technical design problems, is what makes their GUI more intuitive. I think this is one aspect that distinguishes Apple’s user friendliness from others.

Here is a little story from Apple …
At one design meeting Apple guys were scrutinizing the three little buttons on the top left corner of every window. These were used for closing, shrinking and expanding. 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 they were for. Hard to communicate what these buttons did before the user clicks on it. There were many interesting suggestions to the problem and Jobs came up with what seemed to be an old and uninteresting idea…using traffic lights to symbolize each button function! The designers of course thought it was strange and boring BUT after a few weeks of trial, yeah it made all the sense to them…red meant close and green to expand.

The other thing that is very unique about Apple is their layman approach to problem solving. Steve Jobs remarked on Apple after taking over as its interim CEO in the 90’s, “I can’t find sex in apple machines anymore!” True eh? people got to relate more personally to the software they use!

The starting point of the iPod was not about a hard drive and a chip in a walkman. It was simply user experience! It meant concentrating on navigating content. FULLSTOP! Apple was paying so much attention to “saying no” to features that would make the iPod NOT simple.

Apple believes that the most important decisions you make are NOT the things that you do, but the things you decide NOT to do.
I think this is a very good approach for making things simple and easy. Less is more!

When it comes to user design and user design innovation, a lot of companies like to say and think that they are customer-centric. They approach their users and ask them what they want. This user centric innovation is driven by feedback and focus groups. But Jobs shuns laborious studies such as these where users locked in a conference room go through gruelling hours of no productivity. What one really has to do with the focus group is to just observe them and NOT listen to them.

What Jobs does is even much simpler. To Play with the new technology himself. He notes down his own reactions to it and gives his feedback directly to the engineers. Jobs believes that if the technology works for him it will work for others. Of course, one has to have a layman approach when playing around. Steve Jobs is neither an engineer nor a business expert. He is a master layman!

John Sculley the ex CEO of Apple says “ 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 seen one before!’”

Creativity in art and Technology is about individual expression. Just as an artist couldn’t produce a painting by conducting a focus group study, Apple doesn’t use them either. They try it themselves!!

I think this can apply for us as well. Toyota believes that every engineer should be a quality controller too. For us we got to design and test our own software and give critical feedback! More and more!! I see very many good ideas pop up during our internal design discussions and during development. Some of them get implemented straightaway. Great! But I think we just have to get better at it…better at critically analyzing what we do. I don’t mean to say that “we should start shitting on our own doorstep”, this is bad :-) I mean that we should do more constructive criticism of what we make…let it be design or coding. This I think will enable us produce easier solutions for our customers.

If Sony started believing on customer studies and feedback alone, they would never have released their famous walkman in the 80’s. The company did though invest a lot of money into market research before releasing the walkman. All the marketing research said that the walkman was going to fail dramatically. No one would buy it! But the founder Akio and his team believed strongly in their product and pushed it through anyway. It became one of the greatest hits.
It’s the same with Steve Jobs he does not require user groups because he himself is an user experience expert.

So why don’t we as visual/interaction designers and coders and salesmen spend more time on analyzing and testing the stuff we design and develop?
This will make our product easy to use! We got our core value in there, “We make it ez”