Apple and The CXO

by Thomas Brady in , , , , ,

Previously, on Bash Modern Quantity…

Coming up on a year ago, I asked the Internet "What's missing from Apple's Org Chart?". My premise went…

  1. Apple's biggest advantage over its competitors is its superior user experience,
  2. this superior user experience is the result of having a strong UX team at Apple and that
  3. a key to maintaining or growing this team and its strength would be strong, empowered leadership.

After lots of digging I could only find evidence of a director-level position within the UX discipline at Apple (also here). No vice presidents. No senior vice presidents. Nobody with a C in their title. It seemed obvious enough that Steve Jobs would have seen himself as the C-level representation of UX concerns at Apple, but it seemed equally obvious—to me, at least—that Tim Cook is not similarly capable of wearing that hat. It seemed to me it was time to appoint a high-level head of user experience design at Apple.

This week, on Twitter…

I read, via Crystal Ehrlich, Reuben Steiger's article, "Who's the Chief Experience Officer?", in which he described the need for such high-level representation thusly,

The crux of the problem is that building great experiences is everyone’s responsibility and nobody’s job.

If anyone was to have a CXO, wouldn't it be Apple?

Well, I think they do have a CXO, of sorts, and I'll tell you who it is. Well, actually, I'll let Steve Jobs tell you what he told Fast Company:

Think of it this way. If you look at your own body, your cells are specialized, but every single one of them has the master plan for the whole body. We think our company will be the best possible company if every single person working here understands the whole master plan and can use that as a yardstick to make decisions against. We think a lot of little and medium and big decisions will be made better if all our people know that.

John Siracusa, if he's reading this, just thought the phrase, "hippie-dippy," and who can blame him? This sounds like idealist, weirdo, airy Steve Jobs rambling, doesn't it? But here's the science behind it.

Business science.

James Allworth thinks "Steve Jobs Solved The Innovator's Dilemma." I think he's right. And I think this is a big part of how he did it.

In case you aren't familiar with The Innovator's Dilemma [yes, that's a dirty, dirty affiliate link], it was the 1997 Harvard Business School Publishing release by Clayton Christensen wherein he coined the term "disruptive innovation." Disruption theory is beyond[me and] the scope of this post, but it describes the vicious cycle in which what we would call a startup can become a big, slow-moving beast of a corporation, and can, therefore, stagnate, stop innovating, and fail to thrive while another startup comes along and steals its market. In short, it's not enough to come up with an incredible product. You have to keep coming up with incredible products, even if the new ones threaten sales of your old ones, or even your current, successful products. It means taking some risks, getting into markets you don't have any proven ground in and not holding onto anything too tightly. It's being able to change what your company is and does when the market changes, or, preferably, before the market changes. Like turning "Apple Computer," manufacturers of Macintosh personal computers into "Apple," the consumer electronics and media company.

I'll leave it to the Harvard guys'n'gals to go any further with that line of thought, but there's a nugget within there that's germane to our topic (no, I haven't forgotten what it was). How do you keep your finger so close to the pulse of the market that you know how and when to change what your company is and does? This is where the Venn diagram of "User Experience Design" and "Business Model Innovation" overlap, and I'm not the only one who thinks so.

In "The hiring and firing of milkshakes and candy bars," episode 19 of Horace Dediu and Dan Benjamin's "The Critical Path," Dediu describes his own independent arrival at Christensen's theoretical solution to the innovator's dilemma, while observing user experience researchers at work:

The idea is that rather than asking people what they want—showing them things and asking, 'What do you think of that?' you would observe them using the product… It was very useful in identifying why people were clicking in the wrong places. This was a process of cleaning up the interface and finding out where people might be led astray. And I remember trying to actually suggest that method—and I was learning about this at a time before I knew job-to-be-done theory at all, I mean, it was actually before the second book was published, which I think is where it was introduced, in The Innovator's Solution [TQB: yes, another affiliate link]—and so it sort of clicked in my mind… that observation of actual behavior is more important than asking wishes, or asking of people what they want."

This is job-to-be-done theory: the idea that you can predict a market's behavior by looking at why your customer wants your product—what your customer hires your product to do—and optimizing your product to do that job well. If you're really good at this, you can figure out that customers are hiring unlikely products to do certain jobs because there are no better options, in which case you've just found an invisible untapped market. Or you might figure out that a sizable portion of the market is hiring a particular product because it's the best suited to do the job for which they've hired it, but that it's not really getting the job done. It's a "successful" product in terms of metrics such as sales or brand recognition, but customers may ultimately be very frustrated with it, even if they aren't aware of their frustration. This is how RIM's wildly "popular" BlackBerry could be toppled, among several others, in such short order by such an inexperienced little company such as Apple.

And how do you find out what your customer has hired your product to do? As Dediu said, you do user research, in the tradition of the user experience designer.

Obviously, then, I'm all the more justified in my cry for a C-level representative of the UX discipline at Apple, right?

I don't think so.

I think I was right when I said, "Steve Jobs was the de facto [head] of UX at Apple," but I think I was only half right. Whereas Steiger put it so poignantly, as quoted earlier in this article, "building great experiences is everyone’s responsibility and nobody’s job," I think at Apple building great experiences is everyone’s responsibility and everyone's job, especially if you have a C in your title. I think this is what Steve Jobs was talking about with his each-cell-knowing-the-master-plan analogy.

The executive leadership at Apple has been in charge of this for years. Think about keynote events. Who does the demos? Sure, while he was alive, Steve Jobs did the lion's share (yes, an intentional pun), but come on. Steve Jobs doesn't sit on the bench. More and more, though, even while he was still doing the majority of demos, executives of the top several levels demoed their hardware and software. As far back as 2000 you'd see these guys in the promotional videos released alongside the G3 Cube or the first aluminum PowerBooks. Yes, I realize that even Microsoft executives demo their own software, but I challenge you to compare those demos favorably. On one side you'll get a lot of boilerplate, stiff, clearly-rehearsed deliveries of speeds and feeds. On the other you'll hear someone speak with obvious first-hand, deep knowledge of the practical benefits of what they're showing you—the improvements to the user experience.

Not enough to convince you that the executive leadership at Apple is the apparent co-CXO of the company? How about this one, quite possibly the most important UX design datail in the history of Apple, the feature that could be credited for bringing Apple back to life: the iPod's click wheel? It was invented by Sr. VP of World Marketing, Phil Schiller.

This is the body-and-cell analogy quoted above. I don't think Steve Jobs tried to hide his solution to the innovator's dilemma, I think he just phrased it in ways he knew his competitors would never even try to understand. Here he is spilling the beans in Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson,

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything.

Sounds a lot like one of Steve Jobs's heroes, Walt Disney:

We don't make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.

It also sounds a lot like something one of the other cells in the Apple body—Jon Ive—was quoted saying to Wired:

We are really pleased with our revenues, but our goal isn't to make money. It sounds a little flippant, but it's the truth. Our goal and what makes us excited is to make great products. If we are successful people will like them and if we are operationally competent, we will make money.

That's good user experience design summed up quite nicely by someone who neither came from a UX background nor occupies a UX role at Apple. People often credit Ive with all things design at Apple, but he and his team are industrial designers. To be sure, what he does is a major part of the experience in an Apple product, but he doesn't work alone, or even head the division. Ive doesn't likely call any shots when it comes to pixels.

At most places, a user experience designer, if that title even exists, works in the domain of pixels. If it's a really enlightened company, they might get to sit at the table when decisions about hardware or services are being made. At Apple, they don't stop at pixels, they don't stop at power buttons and they don't stop at unibody construction. They don't stop at the packaging, and they don't even stop at the store display. They keep going. It's why you can buy most items in an Apple store right from your phone, without having to stop and wait in a checkout line. It's why you can get first-class support in person at the Genius Bar. It's why I haven't had to call them more than once in a decade, and why I never heard hold music that one time I did.

TLDR;

It's way too late for that header, isn't it?

This seemingly fussy little organizational detail may hold half of the secrets to Apple's wild success. They don't have a CXO because they don't need one. They don't need one because they've infused their very business model with the concerns, the metrics and even the techniques of user experience design.

UPDATES

Horace Dediu, responding via Twitter:

@thomasqbrady That's right. The CXO's job description is a "value" or priority that should be embedded in every employee.

Real artists

by Thomas Brady in , , ,

So if you're any kind of Mac nerd you've by now seen numerous photos of early iPhone prototypes now made public domain by inclusion as evidence in the ongoing Apple v. Samsung case.

The Verge featured write-ups, with galleries, on the 26th and the 30th and NetworkWorld today posts a deposition from Douglas Satzger, an industrial design lead who worked at Apple at the time the iPhone was being developed.

There are a few interesting things to me about all this. On the snarky end, the inexcusably poor coverage has been a bit of a surprise. The number of headlines and even whole articles accusing Apple of ripping off Sony design, having clearly not read any of the words in the source materials that weren't in one of the pictures of the prototypes is appalling. It's pretty clear, if you bother to read any of this, that a designer (or some designers) was (were) asked to design something in Sony's style.

The most striking thing of all, to me, is the design itself. This composition from The Verge tells the story best:

It's clear, looking at that 2005 design, that Apple envisioned the iPhone as we know it now—the iPhone 4 and 4s industrial design—before they designed the original iPhone and the 3G/3GS.

I'm very impressed by a company that can not only devise what is, in their estimation, the perfect design and eventually realize it in a shipping product, but can also ship iterative, real-world-constraints-compatible versions on the way there—iterative, real-world versions, by the way, that disrupt entire industries, several at a time. The iPhone was clear two steps forward for Apple, despite the one-step back design and capabilities of the first generation.

Apple had to make some compromises to get that design to market. They had to choose: do we make something that is as powerful as we want, but is maybe a tad way-too-gigantic, or do we sacrifice some power to get the right size? What can we ship now that will be a good jumping off point for the next version, which can be another step toward the product we dream of shipping?

Two of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes come to mind.

"I'm as proud of what we don't do as I am of what we do"

And, of course, "Real artists ship."

The Apple Book I Didn't Know I Was Waiting For?

by Thomas Brady

If you’ve read much of my blog you are probably aware of two things right away (among others)

  1. I wasn’t impressed by Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs bio
  2. I really dig Ken Segall

So it’s no surprise that Ken’s announcement today might as well have been, “We’re doing Christmas twice this year.” In actuality, what Ken said was, to paraphrase, “I wrote a book about Steve Jobs and Apple.”

Glee.

I am not a salesman. I will benefit in no monetary way from promoting this book on my blog. I have not read a word of the book, yet. But I have no reservation recommending you pre-order this book, as I will. You see, there are few people who are qualified, truly qualified, to write this kind of book. None of them, so far, have written such a book. Ken isn’t a reporter or a journalist. He’s not a professional biographer with general interest in Steve Jobs as an example of the human condition. Ken worked side by side with Jobs for years. He was there for so many key Apple decisions — there in the room with Steve and the Apple team. And he wasn’t just some observer. This is the man that named the iMac.

And unlike most of the other people who could write a book from such a perspective, Ken hasn’t been isolated to Apple’s walled garden for all of his career. He’s seen how the other team does things.

I should step aside and let Ken do what he does best:

My observations come from over 12 years of experience as Steve’s agency creative director, from NeXT to Apple. Also relevant to my story are the years I spent on the agency team during John Sculley’s rule at Apple. And then I had some interesting (and often excruciating) experiences in the worlds of Dell, Intel and IBM — which made me even more conscious of what sets Apple apart.

Run, don’t walk, to iBooks, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound or 800-CEO-read and pre-order Ken’s Insanely Simple today!

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson: a review

by Thomas Brady

UPDATE: There’s hope!

UPDATE: Gruber chimes in

In an interview about his recent biography Steve Jobs, author Walter Isaacson had this to say about the writing experience,

[Steve Jobs] gave me an enormous amount of material, and the book kind of just wrote itself.

Yes, it appears to have. It’s all too easy to tell that this book wrote itself. Books, it appears, are not very good authors, probably because they don’t think for themselves.

There are lots of irksome problems with the book. For instance, the author doesn’t even have a handle on Apple’s rather simple product line. Apple has made an operating system called “Mac OS X” since 2000. The X is to be pronounced “ten,” as in the Roman Numeral (the previous version of the OS was called “OS 9”). You can immediately identify the technical merits of a reporter by how he or she refers to the OS. Any of these indicate a luddite: writing Os X, enunciating “oh ess ex” and writing OSX. That last option presents itself in the book, and I’m readying myself to hear Isaacson commit the middle error if I ever hear him interviewed.

There are passages that appear almost word-for-word several times in the book, making it feel as though the text flowed straight from Isaacson’s word processor to a printer, without passing in front of an editor.

Jobs’s complicated story is diced up and told piecemeal. That’s fine. But Isaacson rarely sets context, at least fully, and jumps from year to year, forward and backward in the timeline such that you often ask yourself, “Is this quote from 1994 or 2011?” or “Was this happening at the same time as the stuff at the end of the last chapter? Or before? Or after?”

Some sentences just don’t make sense. Here’s one:

Because Jobs insisted on keeping his unreleased products secret (even the phone that Gizmodo scored in a bar had a fake case around it), the iPhone 4 did not go through the live testing that most electronic devices get.

In case you don’t know, the “phone that Gizmodo scored” was an iPhone 4 prototype that an engineer had on his person — off-campus, enclosed in a “fake case” — which he left in a bar. It was found and sold to Gizmodo for $5,000. Why did the engineer have it off-campus in a “fake case?” Because he was testing it. “Live testing” it.

There are curious details that I think are incorrect. This is very minor, but odd: Isaacson says Steve Jobs wore a leather jacket to the 1998 Macworld Expo in San Francisco. If…

  1. Steve Jobs weren’t so famous for wearing the same black turtleneck all the time
  2. There weren’t so many photos of that day readily available on the Internet
  3. That wasn’t so important a date in particular (the 1998 Macworld Expo is an incredibly important date in Apple history, as it’s the day Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple to keep it from going out of business), so that there weren’t so many articles written about that day, many of which mention Steve’s clothing choices and fail to mention the leather jacket

then maybe I would just assume this was a trivial detail that only Isaacson captured. As it is, I must assume that Isaacson got this wrong, and I can’t figure out how he could have gotten this wrong. It’s a minor detail, but if he just made this up or so badly misunderstood his sources that he turned a turtleneck into a leather jacket, it erodes my trust in him as a biographer. Just a little.

[UPDATE: Sharp-eyed Tweeter @KevinCrossman points out that I’ve conflated the Macwold San Francisco and Macworld New York conferences from 1998. San Francisco is the site of the supposed jacket, and New York is the site of the famous Microsoft deal revelation. Crossman says there is a photo in the book of the jacket, but I cannot find it. And Jobs wore a white shirt and black vest at Macworld San Francisco 1998, not the famous black turtleneck, for once.]

[UPDATE: Well, thankfully Jason Snell — editorial director at Mac Publishing, publishers of Macworld — was watching. Not sure if there’s a better source for accurate info regarding this detail. The Microsoft investment was announced at Macworld Boston in 1997. So, clearly, these details are easy to miss, but if I can get it right within a couple hours on my blog, Isaacson and the fact-checking resources I would hope he had should have fared far better.]

John Siracusa spent two episodes (42 and 43) of his show “Hypercritical” filleting the book. His overarching thesis is that only one person will ever have had the opportunity to interview Jobs the way Isaacson did, and that Isaacson, due to inherent incuriosity, blew that opportunity.

I have to agree.

On page 331 of the printed version (in chapter 25), Isaacson quotes Steve Jobs saying, of Yoko Ono, “I can see why John fell in love with her.” Again, this is may be a very minor detail, but Isaacson quickly moves on in the story. I think this is a blatant example of his incuriosity. When have you ever heard someone take Yoko’s side in the “Yoko broke up the Beatles” argument? The fact that Jobs, as die-hard a Beatles fan as there ever was, could say such a thing is intriguing, to say the least. This, I think, could have been a whole chapter. Steve Jobs was, apparently, the kind of person that, unlike the rest of the Beatles, could see what John saw in Yoko. A little exploration of what that says about Jobs’s and Lennon’s common traits would have been fascinating.

What this incuriosity leaves us with is a good amount of raw material (thankfully), far too much thoughtless, undefended commentary (how many times did Isaacson toss the words “unfairly” or “correctly” into a sentence with no explanation?) and an almost complete lack of holistic analysis.

When I say “analysis,” I’m not talking about psychology. There’s plenty of that. Isaacson seems to enjoy pointing out that Jobs never really overcame the pain of knowing that his parents gave him up for adoption. But all Isaacson’s armchair, Psychology Today thinking rendered from the source materials was a self-absorbed, immature, emotionally unstable control-freak.

There are two reasons that’s a complete shame.

  1. We already knew that about Steve Jobs.
  2. I know lots of people that could be described that way (we seem to have been breeding them in the US over the last couple (few?) decades), and none of them started a company in their garage that became one of the most valued corporations in the world.

What made Jobs different? This isn’t really answered.

The only question I wanted answered even more than that was the question of what happened to Jobs between NeXT and his return to Apple. Jobs’s story goes from failure at Apple to failure at NeXT to almost immediate runaway success in his second term at Apple. And it’s not just that he suddenly knew how to make products that inspired real consumer lust — though that’s definitely a part of the equation. When he returned to Apple, he suddenly had business savvy well beyond his years, and certainly beyond what he seemed to have at NeXT. What happened?

Not only does Isaacson fail to answer that question, he doesn’t even think to ask it. Harvard Business Review’s James Allworth thinks Steve Jobs Solved The Innovator’s Dilemma. If that’s true, his contribution to business strategy might even overshadow his contributions to technology, if we can deconstruct his strategy. But if we’re going to do that, we’ll have to start somewhere other than this biography.

By the way, my theory is this: there’s one other key thing that happened to Jobs around the time in between NeXT and his return to Apple. He got married. To a Stanford Business School MBA graduate, who spent three years as a strategist at Merrill Lynch before going to business school. (Laurene Powell Jobs | Wikipedia)

A human interest piece on Steve Jobs is interesting. He certainly had an unusual life. But there was so much to have been gleaned from his story, about business and quality and philosophy and how in the world you unite those things in a singular vision. Steve Jobs took a company from being 90 days away from bankruptcy to having billions of dollars in cash in an extraordinarily short time, when doing so in twenty years would have been impressive.

And no one will ever again have the chance to do “more than forty interviews” with Steve Jobs to find out how he did it.

I have to agree with John Siracusa. Steve picked the wrong guy.

One more thing. This isn’t even a nit to be picked as much as it is a personal agenda that was overlooked. In the Linus Torvalds — who, for convenience’s sake we’ll call the inventor of Linux — biography Just for Fun, it’s mentioned (pg. 149-151 of the first edition) that Steve Jobs met with Torvalds in 1998 and told him “the best thing [he] could do for Linux was to get in bed with Apple and try to get the open source people behind Mac OS X.” This period at Apple isn’t covered very thoroughly in Steve Jobs to begin with. Isaacson’s understanding of how much NeXT software ended up in Mac OS X is shaky, at best. But if Isaacson knew of this meeting, he should have been very curious. What did Steve Jobs want with Linus Torvalds? What did he want from the Linux community? Around this time, there was a vocal contingent that thought Linux might be just a year or so away from being a viable consumer desktop OS, and a free (as in “free beer”) one at that. Microsoft sure seemed to take this as a serious threat. History shows that Linux was “just around the corner” from this goal for enough years that most people gave up. It’s still not consumer-friendly. The Steve Jobs described in Isaacson’s book doesn’t seem like he would have been duped. He would have taken one glance at the Linux desktop’s UI and scoffed. The design-by-committee approach employed by the open source community would have given him hives. So what could he have been after? Did Isaacson miss something? Was Jobs actually desperate enough at this point to hope that the he felt he needed help from the open source community? Was there some other power-play in mind? Unless Avie Tevanian, who was in the room, decides to talk some day, we’ll probably never know.

by Thomas Brady

“This is why MobileMe screwed up. This is why I have dim hopes for iCloud. If the way you get a sense of how your company is doing and where it’s heading is by wandering through a hardware design studio, that’s great if your goal is to make awesome hardware. But increasingly the awesome hardware has to be backed by services, and the fact that that’s just like, “Oh yeah, and also make sure those services all work and everything.” It can’t be an also-ran. That can’t be an ancillary thing. There’s no equivalent of him walking through the data centers…. All that stuff that Google is great at and that Amazon has expertise in and that Apple - that Steve Jobs just seemed to want to work and not have to worry about it. He’s walking through the design studio. That, I thought, was highlighting the fact that if Jobs had lived to be eighty years old, eventually his focus on hardware would have become an Achilles heal, where it was great for when devices were important, and you still make awesome devices, but you really still have to pay attention to that other part.”
— John Siracusa discusses Jobs’ too-sharp focus at Apple in the latest episode of Hypercritical (a little after the hour mark). This is the same tunnel-vision, I think, that resulted in a lack of consistent UX across Apple, and the absence of a leadership structure for UX as a discipline at Apple, as I discussed in “What’s missing from Apple’s org chart.”

What's missing from Apple's org chart?

by Thomas Brady

The Invisible Man

When Apple releases a new product, they often create a video presentation (like this one for the iPhone 4S), shown at the announcement event and perhaps available on their web site for a while afterward. This video usually features Apple executives and perhaps a few celebrities raving about the attractive design, ease of use and innovation in the new product. Jonathan Ive, SVP of industrial design (ID), is almost always present, discussing the decision-making process that resulted in his often breath-taking designs. Ive is an absolute celebrity in the world of design, probably due most to these videos.

Apple is also constantly releasing new software, and there’s just as much innovation and design packed into each byte and pixel. The odd thing is, we don’t normally see videos for these releases, and therefore we don’t really know who to thank for features like Exposé or multi-touch input or reminders with “geo-fences” or the additions/editions Apple made to Siri post acquisition.

When Ive comes up with a novel way to carve aluminum or fuse touch sensors to glass, we hear all about it - straight from the source. When someone at Apple devises a novel way to sense whether you’re typing with your fingers or your thumbs and accommodate for the differences in accuracy accordingly, though, that person (or those people) gets no face time. Often, as in this case, the feature never even gets promoted in any marketing materials.

We simply don’t know who to thank — or who to curse — when it comes to user experience(UX) design at Apple. I hear people praising Ive for the intuitive nature of iOS and OS X Lion all the time, not realizing, I guess, that he’s an industrial designer.

Isn’t that a bit odd?

Apple’s brand is just as tied to UX as it is ID. “It just works” has less to do with unibody construction as it does something like Bonjour. Notice that those links go to apple.com and wikipedia.org respectively.

Within the industry, Apple is famous for UX. Their Human Interface Guidelines documents are read by developers from every platform. Apple is reportedly the first company to employ someone with “user experience” in his title — Donald Norman, no less, in 1995. Norman has certainly become a celebrity within the UX realm.

Take a look at Apple’s executive bios page:

There are a few things of note here.

  1. There’s no one on this page that is responsible for Mac OS X, for one. You do see Scott Forstall, head of iOS Software. While interesting, and probably telling, this isn’t what I want to discuss.
  2. You also don’t see anyone responsible for most of the Apple software that runs on Macs: the iWork suite, the iLife suite or any of the more professional tools like Final Cut Pro and Aperture. This is even more interesting to me, but still only obliquely related to my topic.
  3. The only person on this page with a design title is Ive.

Who’s in charge?

While Steve was still with us, Fortune published this much more in-depth org chart (I can only imagine that many Bothers died to bring us this information) to accompany the article “How Apple Works: Inside The World’s Biggest Startup”. Here we see beyond the executive team to a couple dozen VPs. Even with this view, the word “design” is not showing up as much as you might think.

There’s Hiroki Asai, whose promising title listed in the image is “Creative Director.” Squishy enough to be related, but based on this Quora article (and subsequent Googling), he is the “Creative Director of Graphic Design. With over 200 creatives under his supervision, his team has been responsible for all of the packaging, retail store graphics, website, on-line store, direct marketing, videos, and event graphics for Apple globally for the past decade.” Okay, nothing to do with UX. Speaking of Quora, it appears I’m not the only person asking this question.

Moving on, there’s Craig Federighi, VP of Mac Software Engineering? Wil Shipley seems to describe him as a traditional software engineer - more interested in code than design. Bud Tribble, VP of Software Technology, who reports to Federighi? Appears to have been an early UI developer, per this Byte Magazine article, building UI toolkits, but not designing interfaces.

Well, who’s left? Looking around, we find Roger Rosner. Rosner is the VP of Productivity Apps, and he’s completely disconnected in this diagram. According to ZoomInfo, though, he’s probably a traditional engineer (one who isn’t likely to dabble in designing UX), too.

So, let’s roll up our sleeves. Here’s a search for “senior designers who currently work at Apple” on LinkedIn. Okay, so Apple does employ people with titles which include phrases like “user experience design,” “interaction design” and “user interface design.” So, are there any managers with those words in their titles? Yes, there are. What about “director” or “vice president”? None and none.

A rogue team of UX designers?

So who do these people report to? Well, as it turns out, the executive board, but not in the way you might think. Check out this Facebook thread from University of Michigan Informatics. In it, Apple UX architect Steve Cotterill pulls the curtain back a bit:

From a usability evaluation perspective, Apple doesn’t do much. We don’t use focus groups to inform our designs. And we don’t test our products with users before they are released. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t do anything. Apple tests most of its products with the executive team. Steve Jobs and the VPs personally oversee and approve anything before we announce it and sell it. So in that sense, we do a form of (very specific) user testing. If the executives are unhappy with any part of a product, it doesn’t ship.

While they may not formally report into the executive team (no lines, dotted or otherwise, on the org chart, that is), they do use the executive team as their population sample for usability studies.

I don’t doubt that this worked well while Steve was at the helm, but take a look at that [executive bios page][BIOS] again. Who else on that board would have much to say? It’s impossible for us to know, really, but these titles don’t shout “user experience expert.” If you’ve ever read anything about Steve Jobs, you probably already know where I’m going:

Steve Jobs was the de facto SVP of UX at Apple

When Steve retired from Apple, and again when he passed away, stories came out of the woodwork about his every day interactions with co-workers, competitors, reporters and more. One of my favorite such stores is Brent Williams’:

When Apple introduced iDVD, they had purchased the company that developed the software platform they needed to provide the functionality. When the big meeting came for Steve Jobs to review the capabilities and recommended interfaces that the team had developed, they all got into a big room and placed all of their intricate interface designs, specifications documents, and user experience research all on the walls and prepared to wow Steve with their technical expertise and attention to detail.

When Steve Jobs got to the meeting, he looked around for a minute, then got up and walked to the board. Grabbed a dry erase marker and drew a box. He looked at the audience and said, “This is your interface” pointing to the empty box. He then drew a smaller file folder on the outside of that box. “This is the file you want to make into a DVD” pointing to the smaller file folder. He then drew an arrow from the small file folder to the box indicating the functionality, which is that you simply drag the file over the interface and drop it in. And then he walked out the door. The company was stunned and inspired, and the result is excellent.

In another story, Steve swipes an iPhone from an employee, while sharing an elevator, only to hand the phone back with the unsolicited UI design advice “the background needs more texture.” This employee had nothing to do with the production of the app, but the feedback found its way back to the designer, Neven Mrgan.

Amidst all the controversy over Apple’s skeumorphic UI designs, John Gruber (Daring Fireball) recently wrote, “I’m just saying there’s a very strong line of thought within Apple, which came (and I’ll bet still comes) from the top, that distinctive in-app textures are important.” Gruber did say, though, that he doesn’t necessarily believe that Steve was the sole defender of this style.

Now what?

If you’ve read what I have about Tim Cook, you’ll probably agree with my guess that this is not his strong suit. Tim Cook is an amazing operations man, and we have yet to discover all of his super-powers. I don’t see him taking on the design aspects of Steve’s legacy.

So the question I put to you now is this, can this board lead Apple in innovative user experience design? Or is it time for Apple close the loop between their UX designers and their leadership — time to hire a UX designer to serve on the board as a senior vice president of user experience design?

UPDATES: Some Twitter feedback:

@jamesallworth: …Always put “not knowing who to thank” down to Steve not wanting people poached.

@mrgan: … If a UX magician ever proves themselves at Apple the way Ive has, they’ll be SVP of UX. But, horse < cart.

On the death of Steve Jobs

by Thomas Brady

Yesterday included a funny moment for me. The iPhone 4S was announced. I couldn’t really have cared a whole lot less than I did. I cared. I followed the event between cat naps on my iPhone 4, checking Twitter and various liveblogs. But this Apple product announcement - an event that previously beat out most things in my life, like work, friends, doctor’s appointments, what have you for my mid-day attention - came on a day that had more meaning and impact on my life in the first four hours than most do in all 24. It was the day my daughter was born.

Then today, Steve Jobs passed away. I found out from the TV in our hospital room, while eating dinner. I went first - instinctively - to my iPhone for more information. I’m writing this on my iPad, with my MacBook pro just feet away, as well as my wife’s iPhone. I’m a fanboy, for sure.

This news hits me harder than it might have hit even most fanboys, though. For a reason I’m still just beginning to understand.

When Steve stepped down, just weeks ago, it hit me really hard. I couldn’t figure out what it affected me so. My wife offered, “Could it be that you kind of see him as a father figure?”

I laughed. I didn’t want it to be true. I really wrestle with the fanboy thing. I don’t like fanboys. I try as hard as I can to lead an examined life.

Worse, something about it seemed… pathetic. Trying to claim someone you’ve never met as your father seemed like a desperate, sad thing to me.

But I took it to heart. My wife is quite wise, and dismissing something like this would have been foolish of me. I considered it, deeply. She was right.

I grew up without a father. My father was physically and emotionally abusive, and was out of the house completely before I was 2 - my son’s current age. I grew up with just Mom. The idea of a father is a construct entirely imaginative to me. I pieced together bits of what I saw in friend’s houses, though I don’t remember seeing a lot of dads when I was young. Statistically, half of them might have not had fathers, either.

My idea of a father was based mostly on books, television and movies.

What is a father? For a man, I think one of the chief roles his father plays is that of template. “I want to be like my dad.” “What would my dad do if he were faced with this?” “What would dad think of this?” “Would dad be proud of me?”

With all regards to my career, that person for me was - no, IS - Steve Jobs. He’s my example. He’s the one I look to for answers.

He was not a perfect man, in his personal or professional lives. I can’t really speak intelligently about his personal life, but here is why he will always be one of the men that I call “father.” If I am ever a good leader, it will be due in at least part to this lesson.

Steve was a great leader because he was a great decision-maker, a great judge of character and a great listener. You’ll read countless accounts of people’s one-on-one experiences with him over the next few months. You’ll hear time and again that when people came to him with a good idea, he listened. He didn’t just try to convince everyone around him of his own ideas. He could do that, in part, because he surrounded himself with talented people that he trusted to be smarter than him. He trusted that he had hired people of integrity, that would only defend ideas because they had merit, not because they were their own, and he did the same. And when the time came to make a decision, he didn’t shy away from responsibility by putting things to a vote or let things be compromised by committees. He picked a direction and stood his ground, and expected everyone around him to do the same.

He is still so misunderstood. Watching the talking heads try to explain why he was important was painful. He didn’t invent much, really. Don’t get me wrong, he invented plenty. His name is on more patents than any other current tech CEO. But that was really just icing, I think. And he didn’t make the 1984 commercial or the “Think Different” commercial. I’m sure he had a heavy hand in both, but advertising agencies made those, just the same way they have made commercials for everyone else.

He didn’t invent Pixar. He bought it. He didn’t invent the mouse or the GUI. He bought them.

He wasn’t a magician.

He was a visionary. He was a leader. He simply didn’t have a stomach for “good enough.”

It will take years, I bet, for us to figure out how this loss has changed us, and how his life has changed us. The way Apple has humanized computers brought them out of the basement laboratories and into our pockets. All of our pockets, too, not just hobbyists. Grandma has an iPhone. And she knows how to use it. Our infant children can use them. And if anyone can be called the father of the Internet, it’s Tim Berners-Lee, who did his work on a NeXT computer (the company Steve started after he was ousted from Apple, who was later bought by Apple and whose operating system became OS X - the operating system that powers almost all Apple products today from the Mac to the iPhone). So many TV shows and movies have been made on Macs, from video-editing to screenplay-writing. So many musicians and graphic artists and makers of all kinds prefer Macs.

Goodbye, Steve. Thank you. The world is a very different place because of you. I hope I grow up to be a leader like you some day.

My own father passed away in 2006. I grieved that loss in a confused, hollow way, not knowing the man who fled the responsibilities of husband and father. I grieve it all the more when I experience the limitless joy of hearing my two-year-old say, “Hi, Daddy.” We both missed out on a lot, Dad. I grieve for us both.

Steve Jobs steps down

by Thomas Brady

I don’t know where to go with this post.

Read the Reuters coverage.

Apple is a big(ish) company. They have an extraordinary team. Steve is just one man.

But I do think he’s the heart, soul and muse. Apple was a very different company when he wasn’t there, and it cost them. Dearly. They were nearly completely dead when he returned.

And now, right now, they’re one of the most successful companies in the world.

That’s a really hard act to follow.

Say a little prayer for Tim Cook, won’t you?

I think for me this is going to be one of those life events wherein you always remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when you heard the news. Apple has been so big a part of so many of the developments in technology that have made it exciting to me.

Holy crap! Where did THIS Steve Jobs come from?

by Thomas Brady

He concludes an article posted today with a concise, effective wrap-up:

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.
New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

I have read near-exact copies of that paragraph on sites like Daring Fireball for about a year now. Pundits are expected to say such things. Normally-recluse CEOs, though… There are some doozeys in his article. He asks if, since a Flash-driven site will need to be rebuilt to account for touch devices and modern video delivery mechanisms that improve quality and battery performance, why not just rebuild the whole site in modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript.” Ouch. Not that I disagree, mind you, but that’s a pretty tasty burn on Adobe. Time to speed up my reading of Designing With Web Standards an Developing With Web Standards. Oh, and Adobe, Steve is not the only person asking you to make an HTML5 IDE. Listen to your customers, would you? Flash Builder is practically already an HTML5 IDE, you know…