“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.”
2
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. 4
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.
5
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. 6
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. 7
THE MACINTOSH
8
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. 9
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
13
“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
15
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
16