Steve Jobs by Atif Nagi

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like.

People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

STEVE JOBS Atif Nagi, July 19, 2015 Essay 01: Digital Revolution Professor David Edwin Meyers IXDS5503 Media History and Theory Master of Arts Degree in Interactive Design Lindsey Wilson College, Columbia, Kentucky

Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s (along with engineer, inventor, and Apple Computer co-founder, Steve Wozniak). Shortly after his death, Jobs’ official biographer, Walter Isaacson described him as the

“creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.”

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In addition, Jobs’ proximity to Silicon Valley influenced his interest in the budding personal computer industry of the 1970s. After a brief period at Atari, Inc., he co-founded Apple in 1976 in his parent’s Los Altos home on Crist Drive in order to sell Wozniak’s Apple I personal

not need manuals. “That simplicity rubbed off on him and made him a very focused product person,” said Ron Wayne, who worked with Jobs at Atari. In addition, Bushnell was able to

“There is something indefinable in an entrepreneur, and I saw that in Steve” Bushnell recalled.

help mold Jobs into an entrepreneur.

computer. “Jobs and Woz” gained fame and wealth a year later for the Apple II (which was designed primarily by Wozniak, but Jobs oversaw the development of its unusual case and Rod Holt developed the unique power supply) one of the first highly successful massproduced personal computers. The Apple II dominated the personal computer market until it was destabilized by the introduction of the IBM-PC in 1981.

Lessons at Atari Jobs would later say that he learned some important lessons at Atari, the most profound being the need to keep interfaces friendly and intuitive. Instructions should be insanely simple: “Insert quarter, avoid Klingons.” Devices should 3

A visionary leader

Jobs was not a great engineer, but he was good at getting people to do things.

“I looked at it as a two-for-one thing,” Bushnell explained. “Woz was a better engineer.” He was also a lovable and naïve teddy bear of a guy, who was as eager to help Jobs make a video game as Tom Sawyer’s friends were to whitewash his fence. “This was the most wonderful offer in my life, to actually design a game that people would use,” he recalled.

Apple I After Wozniak and jobs demonstrated the computer at a Homebrew meeting, Jobs was approached by Paul Terrell, the owner of a small chain of computer stores called The Byte Shop.

By the time Jobs had finished his pitch, Terrell had agreed to order fifty of what became known as the Apple I computer.

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Apple II When it came time to build the Apple II, he did not spend much time studying microprocessor specs. Instead he went to Macy’s at the Stanford mall and studied the Cuisinart. He decided that the next personal computer should be like an appliance: all fit together with a sleek case and no assembly required. From the power supply to the software, from the keyboard to the

With the Apple II and then, more notably, the Macintosh in 1984, Apple pioneered the practice of creating machines that users were not supposed to open and fiddle with their innards.

The Apple II also established a doctrine that would become a religious creed for Steve Jobs: his company’s hardware was tightly integrated

monitor, everything should be tightly integrated.

with its operating system software. He was

“My vision was to create the first fully packaged computer”

a perfectionist who liked to control the user experience end to end. He didn’t want to let you

he explained. For every one of them there were a

clunky operating system on it, nor buy Apple’s

thousand people who would want the machine to be ready to run.

buy an Apple machine and run someone else’s operating system and put it on someone else’s junky hardware.

By early 1977 the Apple II was the first personal computer to be simple and fully integrated, from the hardware to the software. It went on sale in June 1977 for $1,298, and within three years 100,000 of them were sold.

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The graphical user interface

Jobs was aroused by competition, especially

Eureka moment

when he thought it sucked. He saw himself as Steve Jobs and his team at Apple bought a new

an enlightened Zen warrior, fighting the forces

Jobs was certainly not the first outsider to see

IBM PC as soon as it came out. They wanted

of ugliness and evil. He had Apple take out an

what Xerox PARC had created. Its researchers

to check out what the competition looked like.

ad in the Wall Street Journal, which he helped to

had given hundreds of demonstrations to visitors,

The consensus was, to use Jobs’s phrase, “It

write. The headline: “Welcome, IBM. Seriously.

and they had already distributed more than a

sucked.” This was not simply a reflection of

thousand Xerox Altos, the expensive computer

Jobs’s instinctive arrogance, although it was

On Visits to Xerox PARC, he was shown many

developed by Lampson, Thacker, and Kay that

partly that. It was a reaction to the fact that the

of the ideas that Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart, and

used a graphical user interface and other PARC

machine, with its surly c:\> prompts and boxy

their colleagues had developed, most notably

innovations. But Jobs was the first to become

design, was boring.

the graphical user interface (GUI, pronounced

obsessed with the idea of incorporating PARC’s

GOO-ee), which featured a desktop metaphor

interface ideas into a simple, inexpensive,

with windows, icons, and a mouse that served

personal computer.

as a pointer. The creativity of the Xerox PARC team combined with the design and marketing

Once again, the greatest innovation would come

genius of Jobs would make the GUI the next

not from the people who created the breakthroughs

great leap in facilitating the human-machine

but from the people who applied them

interaction that Bush, Licklider, and Engelbart

usefully. When Job’s saw the full presentation,

had envisioned. Jobs’s two main visits with his team to Xerox PARC were in December 1979. Jef Raskin, an Apple engineer who was designing a friendly computer that would eventually become the Macintosh, had already seen what Xerox was doing and wanted to convince Jobs to look

“You’re sitting on a goldmine,” he shouted. “I can’t believe Xerox is not taking advantage of this.”

into it.

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II, would merely generate numerals or letters on the screen, usually in a ghastly green against a black background. Bitmapping allowed each and every pixel on the screen to be controlled by the computer—turned off or on and in any color. That permitted all sorts of wonderful displays, fonts, designs, and graphics. With his feel for design, familiarity with fonts, and love of calligraphy, Jobs was blown away by bitmapping.

What caught his attention was the graphical user interface featuring a desktop metaphor that was as intuitive and friendly as a neighborhood playground. It had cute icons for documents and folders and other things you might want, including a trash-can, and a mouse-controlled cursor that made them easy to click. Not only did Jobs love it, but also he could see ways to improve it, make it simpler and more elegant.

The GUI was made possible by bitmapping, another innovation pioneered at Xerox PARC. Until then, most computers, including the Apple

“It was like a veil being lifted from my eyes,” he recalled. “I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.”

As Jobs drove back to Apple’s office in Cupertino, at a speed that would have awed even Gates, he told his colleague Bill Atkinson that they had to incorporate—and improve upon—Xerox’s

“This is it!” he shouted. “We’ve got to do it!”

It was a way to bring computers to the people.

Later, when he was challenged about pilfering Xerox’s ideas, Jobs quoted Picasso:

“Good artists copy, great artists steal.” He added, “And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

The Apple team simplified the mouse so it had only one button, gave it the power to move documents and other items around the screen, allowed file extensions to be changed just by dragging a document and “dropping” it into a folder, created pull-down menus, and allowed the illusion of documents piling on top of each other and overlapping.

graphical interface in future Apple computers, such as the forthcoming Lisa and Macintosh.

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THE MACINTOSH

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The Macintosh Jobs knew when he unveiled the Mac that it

heroine outracing the authoritarian police to

There was the Apple approach, in which the

throw a hammer into a screen, destroying Big

hardware and the operating system software

Brother.

were tightly bundled, as with the Macintosh and

would propel the personal computer revolution

iPhone and every iProduct in between. It made

by being a machine that was friendly enough

for a seamless user experience.

to take home. At the dramatic product launch,

Apple’s mantra

he walked across a dark stage to pull the new computer out of a cloth bag. The theme from Chariots of Fire began to play, and the word

Jobs repeatedly emphasized that Apple’s

MACINTOSH scrolled horizontally across the

mantra would be simplicity. “We will make them

screen, then underneath it the words insanely

bright and pure and honest about being high-

great! appeared in elegant script, as if being

tech, rather than a heavy industrial look of black,

slowly written by hand. There was a moment

black, black, black, like Sony,” he preached.

of awed silence in the auditorium, then a few gasps. Most had never seen, or even imagined, something so spectacular. The screen then flicked through displays of different fonts,

It was Jobs the rebel taking on IBM. And Apple

documents, charts, drawings, a chess game,

now had an advantage: it had perfected and

spreadsheet, and a rendering of Jobs with a

implemented a graphical user interface, the

thought bubble containing a Macintosh by his

great new leap in human-machine interaction,

head. The ovation lasted for five minutes.

while IBM and its operating system supplier Microsoft were still using curt command lines

The Macintosh launch was accompanied by a memorable ad, “1984,” that showed a young

with c:\> prompts.

“The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.”

Jobs felt that a core component of design simplicity was making products intuitively easy to use. Those do not always go hand in hand.

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Sometimes a design can be so sleek and simple

complexity, you find a way to make the product

better way is to go deeper with the simplicity,

that a user finds it intimidating or unfriendly to

defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style.

to understand everything about it and how it’s

navigate. “The main thing in our design is that

It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter.

manufactured. You have to deeply understand

we have to make things intuitively obvious,”

It involves digging through the depth of the

the essence of a product in order to be able

Jobs told the crowd of design mavens. For

complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go

to get rid of the parts that are not essential.”

example, he extolled the desktop metaphor he

really deep. For example, to have no screws on

That was the fundamental principle Jobs and

was creating for the graphical screen of his new

something, you can end up having a product

Ive shared. Design was not just about what a

computer, the Macintosh. “People know how to

that is so convoluted and so complex. The

product looked like on the surface.

deal with a desktop intuitively. If you walk into an office, there are papers on the desk. The one on the top is the most important. People know how

THE

to switch priority. Part of the reason we model our computers on metaphors like the desktop is that we can leverage this experience people already have.”

Design soul mate Jobs met his soul mate in the quest for true rather than surface simplicity. Ive, sitting in his design studio, once described his philosophy: Why do we assume that simple is good?

Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to 10

After he was forced out, the process at Apple

2001

2007

shifted to being engineer-driven. “Engineers would say ‘here are the guts’—processor, hard drive—and then it would go to the designers to put it in a box,” said Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller. “When you do it that way, you come up with awful products.” But when Jobs returned and forged his bond with Ive, the balance was again tilted toward the designers. “Steve kept impressing on us that the design was integral to what would make us great,” said Schiller.

“Design once again dictated the engineering, not just vice versa.”

2010

Triumphs of Jobs’, the iPod, iPhone and iPad. Jobs’ belief in the power of simplicity as a design precept reached its pinnacle with the three consumer device triumphs he produced beginning in 2001: the iPod, iPhone and iPad. 11

He immersed himself daily in the design of the original iPod and its interface. His main demand

software, the iTunes Store and the iPod hardware and software.

was “Simplify!” He would go over each screen and apply a rigid test: If he wanted a song or a

Jobs

didn’t

just

understand

the

User

function, he should be able to get there in three

Experience. What made Jobs great was his

clicks. And the click should be intuitive. If he

ability to communicate the benefits of his design

couldn’t figure out how to navigate to something,

decisions to key stakeholders and consumers,

or if it took more than three clicks, he would be

ultimately fueling exponential growth for Apple

brutal. “There would be times when we’d wrack

and unprecedented heights of brand loyalty.

our brains on a user interface problem, and think we’d considered every option, and he would

What made Jobs special, sometimes even

go, ‘Did you think of this?’” said Tony Fadell,

a genius, was his fiery instinct for beauty, his

the team leader. “He’d redefine the problem

talent for creating it and his conviction that it

or approach, and our little problem would go

mattered. And because of that, he was able to

away.”

build a company that became the greatest force for innovative design—and the best proof of its

The iPod, and later the iPhone and iPad,

importance—in our time.

were triumphs of Jobs’ original insight in the early 1980s that design simplicity was best accomplished by tightly wedding hardware and software. This was particularly true of the first version of the iPod. Everything was tied together seamlessly: the Macintosh hardware, the Macintosh operating system, the iTunes 12

STEVE JOBS’S IMPACT ON USER EXPERIENCE (UX) INDUSTRY

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“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

can use his company’s phones and touchpads

This chart shows relative growth in percentage

with gestures similar to their natural behavior.

terms of UX Designer jobs. It is not coincidental

This new design approach made his company

that the UX Designer job title began a hyperbolic

the best performer in the high-tech industry.

rise in the summer of 2006. Steve Jobs left our world many gifts. But maybe one of his most

But it also changed the world of design. Look

impactful accomplishments was teaching the

at following indeed UX design job trends chart:

world the importance of UX Designers.

– Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs described UX Design with the above quote in a 2003 article for the New York Times.

In summer of 2007, he showed the world what he meant when he released the iPhone. It is indisputable that this revolutionary device has changed the world of technology.

By positioning users at the center of the analysis and design process, Steve Jobs led the innovation of the most usable consumer electronics products ever. He achieved to create natural-born users of his products. Even kids 14

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References: • The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson • http://www.wired.com/2013/10/why-yourux-designer-wont-be-the-next-steve-jobs/ • http://allaboutstevejobs.com/bio/bio.php • http://www.smithsonianmag.com/artsculture/how-steve-jobs-love-of-simplicityfueled-a-design-revolution-23868877/?noist • http://www.maclife.com/article/gallery/14_ best_inventions_steve_jobs#slide-0 • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_ Jobs_%28film%29

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