Jonathan Ive on Apple's Design Process and Product Philosophy

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/jonathan-ive-on-apples-design-process-and-product-philosophy/?rref=technology&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Technology&pgtype=article

by trauco • 12 years ago

77 34 12 years ago

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

mattsahr• 12 years ago

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

jamra• 12 years ago

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

grinich• 12 years ago

That's the process.

mikevm• 12 years ago

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

baconstrp• 12 years ago

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

justsee2• 12 years ago

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.

mantraxB4• 12 years ago

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.

jshen3• 12 years ago

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.

justsee2• 12 years ago

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.

Dwolb2• 12 years ago

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.

mantraxB4• 12 years ago

They do user testing.

Dwolb2• 12 years ago

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

whoa-duder• 12 years ago

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

pistle• 12 years ago

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.

coldtea2• 12 years ago

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?

leeoniya• 12 years ago

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

moeedm• 12 years ago

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

petilon3• 12 years ago

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.

mwfunk• 12 years ago

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.

alayne• 12 years ago

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

petilon3• 12 years ago

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/

sk5t• 12 years ago

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.

cmelbye• 12 years ago

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.

petilon3• 12 years ago

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.

CmonDev• 12 years ago

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

qself• 12 years ago

Ive is a tool and Steve Jobs used it well.

Jonathan Ive on Apple's Design Process and Product Philosophy

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