This is what we are going to do.
we return with our section dedicated to Steve Jobs. In it we bring you curious stories, anecdotes, successes, failures and much more about one of the greatest geniuses in history. Short, entertaining and every two weeks. All One More Jobs articles will be published at exactly 9:41am California time (click here to find out why).
Today we are going to see how easily Jobs had to create simple products that anyone could use. The story comes to us from the hand of Mike Evangelist, an executive of a German software company that was bought by Apple in 2000. After the acquisition, Evangelist was assigned to the development team of a DVD burning program (which would later become iDVD). And this is what happened:
“We had three weeks to prepare,” says Evangelist. He and another employee designed beautiful mockups of a perfect interface for the new program. When the day came, Evangelist and his team met in the boardroom. They had brought back page after page of screenshots of their prototype, showing the various program windows and menu options, all with documentation describing how the app would work.
“Then Steve walks in,” recalls Evangelist. “He doesn’t look at any of our work. He grabs a marker and goes to the white board. He draws a rectangle. ‘This is the new application,’ he says, ‘he has a window. Drag the video in the window and click on the button that says “record”. That is all. This is what we are going to do‘.”
“We were flabbergasted,” says Evangelist. This was not how decisions were made in his old company. In fact, it’s not like products were planned anywhere else in the industry.
A very short but clarifying example of how very different Apple is from other companies. At Apple it start with the user experience, for the final design that the client will find in his hands. And then all the technical work that is necessary is done to make it come true. In other companies it is done the other way around, inventing things and then looking for their practical application. At Google, employees have 20% of their free time for their own projects. Design comes from many different people, from the inside out. That results in dozens of products each year. And although not everything works, the truth is that some projects have become incredibly successful (Gmail or Google News, for example).
By contrast, at Apple the design goes from the end to the beginning. Employees concentrate 100% of their time on very few products. Evangelist recounts that the interface design of the Mac operating system was carried out by a team of only 10 people. With such a small team, it is normal that they can only release two or three products a year.
This approach worked because Jobs and his team knew exactly what they wanted. Apple’s iron leadership kept the troops focused. “Everyone knows what the plan is,” said a former Apple engineer.
I still have the slides I prepared for that meeting. And they are ridiculous in their complexity.
This was undoubtedly one of Jobs’ great skills. Design a superior user experience. Abandon products for geeks and launch technology for all audiences.
Just yesterday I remembered all this, when I was listening to a radio program. In it they criticized that Apple Music imposes a quality of 256 kbps (compared to 320 for the competition) and does not allow you to choose the sound quality of the music, which they found absolutely unacceptable and proof (more) that the new Apple service was a disaster and nobody liked it. I am not going to take the crystal ball here and predict the success of Music (although I bet that it will succeed). But these experts who were talking on the radio forget that there are billions of people who don’t know what you know is the bitrate of a song. People who care little if it’s 256 or whatever, as long as it sounds good enough. People, in short, who are not, nor do they want to be, experts in technology. An infinity of public that what values is a good user experience and that does not give a damn that their iPhone continues to work perfectly today with a single gig of RAM.
And the Android – iOS fight will never end. Because the geeks will continue to sell how much can be done with a team that you can configure as you please. And they don’t know that 1 billion people use iOS what they want, precisely, is not to have to configure anything.
It is clear that Jobs knew what the user experience is. Let’s hope Cook continues on the same path.
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Via: Fast Company | Original image: B.I.
