Jonathan Ive on Apple's Design Process and Product Philosophy | Hacker News Reader

Jonathan Ive on Apple's Design Process and Product Philosophy

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

77 pointstrauco34 comments

He didn't say anything about process at all. He just reiterated that you must focus on the product.

That's the process.

What else would you be focusing on when you're working on a product?

In the case of Samsung, the opposition's products; in the case of [past] Microsoft, the users; in the case of Facebook, the advertising revenue.

At my day job I'm focussed on what's best for the client, not the website or the client's product itself; such is agency life. When I'm at home I can put away the compromises and make the best damn $thing ever made.

GM, in the bad-old-days of planned obsolescence, was focused on screwing their customers.

The F-35 program is designed to extract as much money as humanly possible from the US Treasury.

There are pharmaceuticals designed the same way. In tandem with lobbyist-penned laws that (a) ban Medicare from negotiating drug prices and (b) ban them from refusing any treatment deemed "medically necessary" they are patent-protected pipelines for moving taxpayer dollars into offshore accounts that are (unsurprisingly) tax free.

The list goes on.

Yes, he meant him focusing on process is the Apple process.

The biggest question I have is does Apple do user testing? Do they trust their small group of designers more than a small sample of the population?

This my biggest question for Apple's design team.

They do user testing.

I guess my question is if there's a disagreement between user testing results and the product development team's own choices, who wins?

Part of being an intelligent person is the ability to make the best call based on all available information.

There's no general rule.

I'll just say that fast iteration is key. You iterate quickly and show users prototypes, and incorporate their feedback (or not), depending on the case.

You can see the "Fake it till you make it" WWDC session on Apple's site, it speaks exactly about how Apple does prototyping and user testing.

Better to call it "usability testing" because you're testing the system NOT the user.

some may find this interesting: http://theultralinx.com/2014/03/dieter-rams-inspired-apple-p...

It is interesting to note that Jony Ive thinks "the change isn't perhaps as dramatic as you might assume." I would like to point out that people outside Apple don't necessarily share this opinion. Here are some quotes from some prominent people in the Apple community:

The Verge wrote: "iOS 7 isn't harder to use, just less obvious. That's a momentous change: iOS used to be so obvious." In iOS 7 basic usability features such as making buttons look like buttons are now stuffed under Accessibility options. About this, Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment wrote: "If iOS 8 can’t remove any of these options, it's a design failure." (And iOS 8 hasn't.) Michael Heilemann, Interface Director at Squarespace wrote, "when I look at [iOS 7 beta] I see anti-patterns and basic mistakes that should have been caught on the whiteboard before anyone even began thinking about coding it." And famed blogger John Gruber said this about iOS 7: "my guess is that [Steve Jobs] would not have supported this direction." Enough said.

I don't see how your second paragraph supports your first. Your second paragraph is just a bunch of quotes from various people who had mixed feelings about iOS 7. That doesn't say anything definitive about iOS 7, much less the company itself.

You cherry-picked a bunch of old quotes from last year that don't accurately represent any of the people quoted.

"It’s a great time to be an iOS developer." Marco Arment, June 6, 2014

It is indeed a great time to be an iOS developer. I love Swift, technologies such as Scene Kit and so on. But that doesn't mean iOS doesn't have some real usability problems. Some of them are documented here: http://uxcritique.tumblr.com/

I'm puzzled that anyone at Squarespace would feel entitled to criticize iOS 7. In my considerable experience using Squarespace, never have I found more than a handful of its features clear and DWIM-ish.

It's a little misleading to include only part of that quote:

"The core creative community is very small but is also very close – there’s been changes there, but the change isn’t perhaps as dramatic as you might assume."

He's saying that there have been changes to their design process and the structure of their design organization, but they haven't been as dramatic as people might assume. Meaning: iOS 7 is a dramatic change from iOS 6, so one might assume that there has been a dramatic change in who's designing the user interface and how it's being designed, but that's not the case.

Regarding the critiques of iOS 7/8 design, keep in mind that it's version one of a new design language. Look at Aqua in the Mac OS X Public Beta a decade and a half ago, and compare it to Aqua in Mavericks. It's going to take some refinement. But from what we've seen in Yosemite, and to a lesser extent iOS 8, they've already begun the process of refining their new design language.

They may have begun refining their design language but is it getting any better? In my opinion it isn't. Here's an example: in OS X Yosemite, buttons and textboxes are rendered the same. (See Safari toolbar for example: look at the buttons and the address textbox.) Also look at Xcode: Look at the status label on the toolbar (which used to be an "LCD".) It too is displayed with the same bevels. So labels, buttons and textboxes are indistinguishable based on their rendering. Who here thinks this is an improvement? They are getting the basics wrong.

Did he finish reading the Microsoft Metro design guidelines this time?

Seriously, Apple PR via third-party technique?

This is just a derivative of the previous NYT fluff piece which might as well be written by Apple.

Actually, the previous NYT piece was a hit-piece on Tim Cook, full of BS and snark.

Also "PR via third party"?

It's an interview. Did you really expect him to badmouth Apple in it?

Ive is a tool and Steve Jobs used it well.

IT is hard to sound more bland than a politician on a softball morning news show. But Ive has done it.

Ive is the real deal. You can't fake this shit.

> This is part of Steve’s legacy. Deep in the culture of Apple is this sense and understanding of design, developing and making. Form and the material and process – they are beautifully intertwined – completely connected.

This is also true of modern web design. It's easy to work out which designers embody it:

* old-school designer - is still slinging over PSDs with little concern or consideration around multiple screens, technical limitations (is there a webfont available for the typeface(s) etc). Doesn't embody the philosophy Ive expresses.

* modern web designer - provides designs as static HTML, necessary to reveal the 'developing and making' considerations around assets, responsive design experiences etc. Definitely embodies the philosophy Ive expresses.

I'm sure you can make your trivial point about the intricacies of web design without having to piggyback on Jonathan Ive's interview.

For the record, a lot of the UI prototyping at Apple is done in Photoshop.

It's also done on paper napkins, in Keynote, in Illustrator, in Xcode and with whatever works.

Good designers don't judge you based on what tools you use, and they're not picky about what tools they use. They'd use anything. The important part is how you think.

You can think about all sorts of screens and devices and do it in Photoshop. You can also produce unusable trite crap in static HTML.

It's much harder to do it in photoshop for things like responsive design. Responsive is dynamic and fluid and it's very difficult to capture that in a few static comps. I like this point about web design is very relevant to Ive's point. Apple isn't perfect, and the fact that Apple does web design a certain way doesn't mean other ways aren't clearly better and closer to the values Ive is discussing. Trying to use apple.com on your phone should lead one to the conclusion that apple isn't doing modern web design well.

>It's much harder to do it in photoshop for things like responsive design.

Then again responsive in the web is a co-out and a fad -- instead of creating the best experience for each screen size, you give them some sliding or expanding divs and some dissapearing elements from the "full-on" design and call it a day.

I've never seen a responsive page I like on a mobile device. I'd take the full page, in which I can pan and zoom, anytime.

I've seen a number of responsive designs I like better than the full page of a regular site. Compare the following sites to using this site, HN, on a phone.

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com

http://video.disney.com

For a site that would be much better with a responsive design look at

http://nytimes.com

I'd draw a parallel to storyboarding for animation here [1]. Most storyboarding artists get their start as animators themselves, so they know the "form and the material and process," so to speak. But when they do storyboarding work, they need to work in an agile and rapid fashion, to consider a user's flow through the "application" at such a high level that they would be hindered by trying to draw every single detail. Should they know innately what is and is not feasible to animate? Absolutely! But this does not mean that they should use the same tools and techniques as animators to perform their work.

Responsive may be difficult to capture in static comps, but when these comps can be made much more quickly, attention can be given to user experience overall, not just isolated fragments of user interface. And it's difficult to deny Apple's success at driving conversions and purchases.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storyboard

I don't know. The top two most frustrating things I encounter on modern web sites are: "infinite" scrolling effects & badly done responsive designs.

While adaptive UI can be done right (and yes, that's the correct name for it, "responsive" typically refers to reaction lag, not screen size), and is definitely a nice tool in the designer's toolbox, it's very telling that various "responsive evangelists" keep popping out of everywhere talking about the virtues of "responsive" where no one asked them. Say like the poster I was replying to here.

This behavior is typical for something at peak hype. They're just so excited about it, they can't comprehend why everyone isn't getting a boner about "responsive" so they have to talk about it non-stop to clue us in on the awesomeness we're allegedly missing. It's like Ruby on Rails all over again.

Which is to say the "responsive" movement right now is 80% bullshit and 20% useful technique (when used in moderation). And I have examples to support that.

Part of "responsive" is the horrible practice of rolling menus into obscure hamburger buttons, outright hiding panels with useful content and functionality, or presenting bizarre interaction patterns that some harebrained designer thought are more smartphone-ey.

This is not helping your users, it's pissing them off and making them spend a lot of time hunting for the "desktop version" link on your site.

"And I have examples to support that."

Do give them.

"This is not helping your users, it's pissing them off and making them spend a lot of time hunting for the "desktop version" link on your site."

Not for the site I worked on. When we switched to responsive mobile use skyrocketed on our site.

Judging by your hostility and focus I think my point (which I don't think is trivial to those working with the web) wasn't clearly communicated.

The best of modern web designers embody that philosophical approach in regards to the 'building / making' element of how a final web design lives. This is a fuller consideration of how the design works, and can only be achieved by working with the 'materials', just as Ive mentions is essential at Apple for product design.

I never said design can't or shouldn't use napkins, keynote, Photoshop, Illustrator or whatever a designer chooses, or pass any commentary on how designers at Apple internally prototype UIs.

I did imply though that a web designer that stops at the PSD mockup stage doesn't embody the design approach Ive is discussing in the article. Without working directly with the materials (HTML / CSS) you are deciding not to entirely consider all elements of how the design lives:

* are webfonts available for this typeface?

* does CSS provide those visual effects, and if not, what fallback designs should I consider?

* can the design work across all target devices / browsers?

* will the page weight be too large to support this particular design approach. Can I simplify to avoid this?

Mocking up a variety of screens in Photoshop does not cut it at the best end of the scale as a web designer.

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