With the passing of Steve Jobs, I thought today was the perfect day to start a post in my UX/UI blog.
Now, I am NOT an Apple fan boy, but I do own an i-device (as do millions of you out there). If you own an iPhone, iPod, iPad, MacBook or even used iTunes on Windows… Congratulations! You’ve been touched by Steve jobs!
I really don’t know what to think of the guy. By many accounts, he was a real asshole! As an Apple employee, someone you don’t want to meet in an elevator… A tyrannical leader whose criticism borders on cruel,… A terrible manager and a terrible executive. Just things I’ve read about him.
He got things done and done well, though. And a lot of his success came in just the last few years of his life. He’s admittedly been on the long path of trial and error. so let’s put all that asshole talk aside and look at what DID make him successful.
To sum it in one word, it’s “simplicity.” As Leander Kahney explained, “Jobs’ idea was that we’ll make it easy enough that anybody can do it … a grandmother, a kid, people who don’t have any experience.”
He didn’t do this alone. He worked with Apple’s designer-in-chief, Jonathan Ive, and I bet it’s largely HIS design work that made Apple successful. A quote I read about their partnership is that, “Both believe in design that takes the “fear” out of a product, sizing and positioning a device’s features so they work in an almost intuitive way.”
Shouldn’t this be the goal of any product? To take the fear out of it so people will actually enjoy using it (even grandma)?
As Creative Director who worked with Jobs, Susan Rockrise says, ”Simplifying complexity is not simple.”
Now… MY personal goal at my company is to simplify complexity, and I have to say… it’s been a HUGE freakin’ CHALLENGE! And I’m still working at it! Perhaps I can take Steve Jobs’ ideals into account when thinking about how to solve a particular challenge.
With that, I leave you with this excerpt from a CNN article article that sums up what I need to get better at…
“What makes Steve’s methodology different from everyone else’s is that he always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do, but the things you decide not to do,” Sculley said in a 2010 interview with Businessweek. “He’s a minimalist. I remember going into Steve’s house, and he had almost no furniture in it. He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed. He just didn’t believe in having lots of things around, but he was incredibly careful in what he selected.”
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