Ken Kocienda, a veteran Apple software engineer and designer, played a crucial role in developing the Safari web browser, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. In his 2018 book, Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs, he offers an unparalleled insider’s perspective on Apple’s creative processes during this amazing era of breakthrough products.
The phrase “creative selection” is Kocienda’s spin on “natural selection,” emphasising how Apple products evolve through prototypes and demonstrations (demos) in the early part of the design process.
It’s always difficult to appreciate history when living through it but look again at that list of products: the iPhone! The iPad! The Apple Watch and more... how has life changed since the birth of these inventions? How have they shaped relationships, health and communication? Kocienda was integral to that revolution.
Now imagine working in a secret laboratory (those working on the first iPhone were sworn to confidentiality – codename: Purple) developing software that would change millions of lives. It’s the tech equivalent of being a record producer at Abbey Road in the 1960s.
And central to this story is Apple’s enigmatic chief, Steve Jobs. What was it like to work for him?
The user guide
In the opening pages of Creative Selection, Kocienda identifies seven elements essential to Apple’s software success:
1. Inspiration:
Thinking big ideas and imagining what might be possible.
2. Collaboration:
Working together well with other people and seeking to combine your common strengths.
3. Craft:
Applying skill to achieve high-quality results and always striving to do better.
4. Diligence:
Doing the necessary grunt work and never resorting to shortcuts or half measures.
5. Decisiveness:
Making tough choices and refusing to delay or procrastinate.
6. Taste:
Developing a refined sense of judgement and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole.
7. Empathy:
Trying to see the world from other people’s perspectives and creating work that fits into their lives and adapts to their needs.
And not an acronym in sight! Just sound guiding principles that I could just as easily apply to my own day-to-day output at Pfizer.
But how did they translate into real progress in product development?
It’s easy to forget there was a time before touch screen keyboards on smartphones. Pre-iPhone, the best we had were the physical, plastic keys beneath a Blackberry screen. Surely a digital keyboard would be too small, too fiddly, right?
That’s where “empathy” comes in; for Apple’s design team to put themselves in the shoes of the end user. But when working on a top-secret product like the iPhone, the scope for testing was severely limited. A balance between empathy and taste became crucial. As Kocienda writes, the team had to be able to trust their own judgement:
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.
To design a touch screen keyboard that wouldn’t frustrate users of the first iPhone was a challenge Kocienda agonised over. He faced the headache of creating virtual "buttons" smaller than a fingertip. Not only did he achieve this, through painstaking research and design, but he also built in a fail-safe – the predictive text options we all know and love today (AKA “damn you, autocorrect!”).
Recognising the need for an autocorrect function to support the keyboard, Kocienda devised systems which would intuit which word the user wanted to type, based both on similar words and words that included letters from nearby keys. He created Dictionary 1: a “static dictionary” which included common words as well as names of famous products, people and teams, and Dictionary 2: a “dynamic dictionary” which was a personalised list of custom vocabulary.
In our daily group chats we likely take all of this for granted… but Kocienda was starting from scratch!
He also dispels the myth of working at Apple as being glamorous and inspirational 100% of the time:
Ideas are nothing without the hard work to make them real... Hard work is hard… inspiration does not pay off without diligence. We collaborated to get through the drudgery.
An important reminder that every billion-dollar product is the result of some element of “drudgery” along the way.
Kocienda quotes Thomas Edison’s famous dictum of "one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration”. And if there’s one thing that would make me sweat, it’s the prospect of writing not one, but two dictionaries!
Great expectations
While vision is crucial in leadership, Kocienda’s book reveals that clear expectations were just as integral to Apple's success. Jobs’ directive to develop the fastest web browser brilliantly exemplifies this.
It’s important here to understand the implication of Jobs requesting the “fastest” browser. You or I might have set our sights on building the “best” browser. A team of software engineers would then have spent time adding gizmos and gadgets to hook the user. This inevitably would’ve resulted in slower page load times. Jobs knew this. Instead, Kocienda and co were tasked with stripping away any and every line of code that wasn’t essential to achieve the fastest load speed possible. Intuitively Jobs understood that a browser was a means to an end. This clear line of sight and ruthlessness affirms the idea that “Think Different” was always more than just a slogan at Apple:
Steve Jobs was always trying to ensure the products were as intuitive, straightforward as possible, and he was willing to invest his own time, effort and influence to see that they were.
The approach paid off – on launch day, Jobs was able to boast that Safari was three times faster than all other browsers.
Collaborative work also came with its fair share of perspiration, as well as some ego-puncturing. Kocienda emphasises the importance of feeling comfortable with feedback, allowing an “open door” policy to ensure that everyone’s ideas could be tested and improved by colleagues.
He states:
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.
Of demos, Kocienda recalls:
Demos were an open forum for exchanging ideas about how an interaction might look or function better. When demos went poorly… 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.
That word “expectation” again sets the tone for how things were done. Not in silos. Not by being precious or perfectionist. But by being prepared and working together to meet those high expectations. Of course “vision” matters, but it was the clarity of expectation that helped achieve the vision.
Taste the difference
So, we get the gist of Jobs, but what about actually meeting him?
Every Apple demo review had a decider, the person with the sole authority to approve or not and the prerogative to declare what would happen next.
And there are no prizes for guessing who the ultimate decider was…
Kocienda describes the moments he spent in Jobs’ office in some detail, juxtaposing his “natural state as an introvert” with the more confident “Oracle of Apple”. Receiving a “slight nod” from Jobs after presenting his vision for the iPad software keyboard was a huge deal.
He never moved his eyes to anyone or anything else. He was completely present. There he was, seriously considering my idea about the next big Apple product. It was thrilling.
According to Kocienda, Apple's renowned design elegance was accomplished through a blend of decisiveness and straightforward good taste:
When it came to choosing a colour, we picked one. We used our good taste – and our knowledge of how to make software accessible to people with visual difficulties related to colour perception – and we moved on.
Taste was a strategic factor – influencing every decision from software interfaces to the tactile qualities of hardware. Every product was immediately recognisable as Apple, resonating on that emotional level consumers – like me – loved. This meant Apple could set trends, rather than follow them.
Surprisingly, though, Jobs didn’t hold his own environment to the same standards. Kocienda relays how Jobs’ office was “shabby, certainly not the decor you would expect in a company as obsessively design-focused as Apple”.
He also reveals that Jobs initially had other ideas for the name of the new Apple web browser:
When I first heard them, I cringed. Early on, Steve liked ‘Thunder,’ but he soon got over that in favor of ‘Freedom.’ I thought both were awful names. I just couldn't imagine telling people, ‘I work on Freedom,’ as if I were some semi-delusional comic book superhero wannabe.
So, they settled on "Safari"; a sort of exploration of the internet, if you will. An internet explor – oh, wait.
A golden, delicious era…
Despite differing opinions on Apple's choices and products since Steve Jobs' passing in 2011, it’s hard to imagine a more fruitful and successful period for any tech company in such a short space of time. And, having spent 278 pages in Kocienda’s company, it’s no surprise that he thrived during his tenure there.
Today, on the day I’m writing this introduction, hundreds of millions of people will use these Apple products, and if you count the browsers on Windows and Google Android that use code based on the Safari browser I helped develop, then the number of daily users runs to well over a billion, perhaps it’s closer to two. Yet we never thought about such big numbers. We were too busy focusing on small details.
By laying bare many of the “small details” that shaped this golden era, he’s provided a brilliant blueprint (or should that be purple print?) for how they might make good on Jobs’ legacy.
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