What makes Apple’s user experience so unique? How did it come about?
BUILDING GREAT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES
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13 SEPTEMBER
08:30 – 11:30AM
Vision
Everyone’s been going on about the genius of Steve Jobs for years now, but I believe that few really know what actually made his approach so revolutionary.
A good starting point is to watch Steve Jobs, The Lost Interview. As this interview was conducted Jobs was running NeXT and within half a year he would be back at Apple, readying the launch of the first iMac.
What becomes clear as you watch this interview is that Jobs steadily but surely discovered his vision throughout his teens and his early stellar career.
And a vision of the world is what lies at the heart of Apple’s user experience. It was never just about creating good-looking products. It was about giving the mind a bicycle, in Job’s words – a tool that would magnify the power of the brain the way a bicycle uses the power of our legs to make us move much faster than we could just walking.
So a revolutionary vision came first, a vision appearing at the right time in the history of computing.
Connecting the dots
Jobs also talks a lot about connecting the dots, and by that he means that at some point very disparate ideas can come together to form a whole you could not see if you were looking in only one place, expecting to solve something immediately. His best example is a calligraphy class he took in college (before dropping out) and how this class years later would make him want to bring beautiful fonts to the computer screen. Something you do now or did in the past will be the dot you need at some point to make the picture complete.
The lesson for user experience design? There are many, but perhaps the most important is this: Make things that originate in your passions and your wishes for what should exist and how.
Connecting the dots is about having a wide field of vision and being prepared, when the time is right, to make an otherwise unintuitive choice.
Hard work and fiction
In the Lost Interview, Jobs goes on at length about the need to be able to work hard and to follow through on your vision. He says that the vision is really only a small little part of what makes the product come into being.
And working hard should happen in an environment where people rub up against each other to create friction. Through that friction and heat something appears that was never possible otherwise.
This part of Job’s attitude to work and design is where he’s been most criticised, but it clearly also worked, if you only look at the products that were made under this ethos.
The lesson? Don’t be afraid of conflict. Controlled conflict will make your product better.
Love
The success of Apple since the advent of the iMac is a story of a revolutionary vision made reality through a lot of hard work and conflict.
At the heart of the user experience design was the idea that people should not be looked down on by designers, but that designers should work as enablers of personal life lived more creatively and productively.
The idea of lovable products is only an extension of the fact that Apple designers were giving a lot of love to the user and customer when they were making something that was intuitively more meaningful and better.
You can only command love and extremely high prices if there is something genuinely good and powerful about what you have to offer – if you’ve put your heart and soul in it.
Want to find out more about building great customer experiences? Make sure you sign up to the DSMLF meeting on 13th September and join your peers for a lively debate on the matter.