by Thomas Q Brady
I'm a sucker for big-picture pieces like this, solutions to the problem of creating consistent, yet distinct experiences across a platform. Here we have GE creating a "sound palette" from which to pluck bleeps, blorps and chimes for distinct interactions with microwaves, refrigerators, stovetops, etc. Via Small Surfaces.
Pro tip: If…
Let's just say maybe it's a good time to start buttering up your LinkedIn "friends."
Just ask Scott Forstall and John Browett, who, at least by the end of the year in Forstall's case, no longer work for Apple.
This is big.
Big enough to pull me out of an uplanned hiatus from the blog. Family emergency. My mother-in-law is recovering quite well, if slowly, from cardiac arrest while competing in a—not her first—triathlon.
Big enough that it brings a pretty obvious final answer to a series I'd been working on that could have been titled, "Who the hell is in charge of User Experience at Apple?" (Part 1: "What's missing from Apple's Org Chart?" & Part 2: "Apple and The CXO")
It's clearer now than it has ever been who it was that answered for user experience design across Apple. Just look at the lanugage of that press release, on what activities are being transfered from Forstall to Ive:
Jony Ive will provide leadership and direction for Human Interface (HI) across the company in addition to his role as the leader of Industrial Design. His incredible design aesthetic has been the driving force behind the look and feel of Apple’s products for more than a decade.
Who's the CXO at Apple? Well, now we know. It's Jony Ive. The oh-so-obvious, but oh-so-wrong answer that so many people would have offered for so many years now has become the right answer.
And I think this might be the biggest news since October 5th, 2011.
I don't think that for all his time as VP (or senior VP) of iOS Forstall called all the UX shots. I believe that when Steve Jobs was alive, this—along with whatever else he cared about that day—was Jobs's purview. But when you phrase it in the business organization classic definition of "a throat to choke," that throat was Forstall's, I think, for some time now.
But the most dramatic subplot of this whole story is Sir Jony Ive's. Ive doesn't have any UI/UX design under his belt, at least not any that anyone knows of. He has seen great success designing hardware for Apple for over two decades, but from what we can see from the outside he hasn't touched a pixel.
This could go two ways. In the first scenario, Ive could turn out to be an incredible UI/UX designer as well as an industrial designer, or, perhaps more likely, he could prove to be able to lead a team of UI/UX designers effectively. In the second, he could terrible, or even only mediocre at the job, either of which would have the same outcome.
Apple is more vulnerable than it has been in some time. If it turns out that Ive is no good at this, Apple's reputation will be shaken like it hasn't been since the Newton. People already have high expectations of the man that was knighted for being such a design badass. People are looking for someone on whom to pin the Steve Jobs legacy. If Ive fails, "beleaguered," will be the nice thing the press says about Apple, which will certainly catch the attention of both the customers and Wall Street.
There is a hell of a lot (around $604 per share at the moment, not to put too fine a point on it, but, of course, Wall Street is closed for a few days) riding on that young man right now. For once I don't envy him.
“Don’t build an app based on your website. Build the app that acts as if websites never existed in the first place. Build the app for the person who has never used a desktop computer. Because they’re coming. Soon.”
Coming up on a year ago, I asked the Internet "What's missing from Apple's Org Chart?". My premise went…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, I’m not going to discuss health care legislation. No, it’s actually _not_ called “Obamacare.” wait, we’re not going to talk about that…
My family sees three doctors that have chosen to eliminate the headache of dealing with insurance companies from their lives. Their amazing doctors, and so we keep seeing them, despite them having rolled this “package” of pain downhill to us.
This means for the past few years, and past few providers, I’ve been submitting claims to insurance companies myself. Regularly.
All of them have labyrinthine web sites, filled with links that fail to keep the promise of what they say lay behind them, not to mention broken links, and pages an forms with names not even a librarian could love.
I can’t tell you how many forms I’ve filled out, only to find no instruction on where to send it, what to include, what response to expect, or, tragically, choosing the right form in the first place. Fine print that says “This form is for care administered outside the US only” or “this form cannot be used for mental health claims” really has no business being near the bottom of the page nor in FINE PRINT.
Banks took their time, but even my local credit union will now let me scan and deposit a check on my phone.
Insurance companies: it’s 2012. If I can’t submit a claim easily and quickly from a camera-equipped mobile device by the time I buy my first flying car, I’m moving to Canada. I hear the mounties actually fill those forms out _for_ you, in the odd case you actually have to fill out a claim form.
If you need UX design or developer help, Blue Shield of California, I know some people.
“Interaction design is engineering: it’s not about finding the perfect design, it’s finding the best compromise.”
Okay, Google. Now we’re talking. With all the UI enhancements promised yesterday, and thoughtful features like those in this video, things might finally start heating up in the mobile UX war.
Such a strange situation: Mozilla skinning a WebKit browser.
Full-screen is obvious, but proven well.
So, you take away the heavy UI chrome we’ve come to expect at the top and bottom of the screen, but then you float a couple, apparently always-on, buttons half-way down the page I’m trying to view? This seems like a bad compromise.
I do very much like the search, enter URL, find a recently visited site and choose a bookmark as a single screen.
Via Small Surfaces.
“You guys, the “New iPad” (3) is pretty amazing. This feels like the fastest computer I’ve ever owned. Things happen IMMEDIATELY.”
THAT guy. You know the one: quotes Jim Carrey movies a full year after they’ve been released to video. In this case, me, who just got an iPad 3.
It really is different. I’ve had it a few hours, and I already notice that my iPhone 4S has noticeable lag. I’m not complaining by any means, but it is amazing what you can quickly begin to expect from your electronics.
I see my finger hesitating over where I know a button will appear in a moment or two, having been trained by several generations of iOS devices, while simultaneously noticing that the New iPad is actually waiting for me.
Then after I’ve used it for a bit, I pick up my iPhone 4S and find myself tapping too quickly and having to stop and wait for the phone to catch up.
Incredible.
What a day.
Computers. Good luck keeping up, eh?
This isn’t just a concept video, or even just a prototype video. These are available for pre-order. Sure, that’s not guarantee they’re not vaporware, but it’s still impressive.
Via Nick Finck.
Humbling, inspiring informative talk on practical UX design and influence from Melissa Matross or Hotwire.
Good work, eBay.
Good work, eBay.
Via bigweek:
A fancy Italian restaurant with a fancy and, presumably, expensive reservation system is actually utilized by waiters viewing only one of its many screens, and drawing on said screen with a dry erase marker.
If you make software and you don’t have a direct relationship with your user in some way, this is what happens.
Oxy moron jokes aside, Android’s new Design site is nice. Matias Duarte nice. You know, the guy that designed the WebOS user experience.
It’s pretty for sure, but already some are calling its content into question. Dustin Curtis tweeted,
The Android Design site is just a list of interface components, whereas the iOS HIG is an implementation guide. Huge difference.
I think it’s a bit more than a “list of interface components,” but I agree that it’s certainly not as in-depth as Apple’s HIG. It’s miles ahead of what they’ve provided to date, though.
Does make me wonder what took so long. Duarte joined Google in May of last year. Perhaps parts of his non-compete clause are just now expiring?
“Rather, the process should mimic nature, to be organic; it posits an object’s form naturally evolves out of resolving its purpose, the way bees instinctively build a beautiful and efficient, geometric honeycomb. Nature has no “visual design” phase. Why do we?”
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Why is it that on my laptop, if I go to Linked In and attempt to “Add [so and so] to my network,” I am challenged to demonstrate how I know them, and discouraged from attempting to add them if I admit that I don’t actually know them - and challenged to provide an email address if I say we’re friends. But with the iOS app, I can just “invite” people to connect with no issue?
“When I tap a button in an Android app it should feel like I’m tapping a (goddamn) button. Instead, it feels like I’m filing and submitting a requisition form for the function I wish the app to eventually perform…and the person who needs to sign it has already left for the weekend.”
