Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [17]
Jobs, Ratzlaff, and the designers settled into an in-depth discussion of the old Mac interface and how it might be overhauled. Ratzlaff ’s team showed Jobs their mockups and the meeting wrapped up well. “Prototype these things and show them to me,” Jobs instructed them.
The design team worked for three weeks, night and day, building working prototypes in Macromedia Director, a multimedia authoring tool often used for mocking up custom interfaces for software or websites. “We knew our jobs were on the line so we were pretty worried,” Ratzlaff said. “He [Jobs] came over to the offices. We spent the whole afternoon with him. He was blown away. From that point on, it was clear there was going to be a new user interface for OS X.”
Jobs was so impressed that he said to Ratzlaff: “This is the first evidence of three-digit intelligence at Apple I’ve seen yet.” Ratzlaff was happy to take the compliment. For Jobs, acknowledging you have an IQ higher than 100 is a glowing endorsement. Confident that their jobs were safe, Ratzlaff and the designers celebrated with a few six-packs of beer. But they became nervous when they saw Jobs coming back down the corridor with Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing. Luckily, Jobs was pleased. As Jobs approached, they heard him tell Schiller excitedly, “You’ve got to see this.”
“From then on we had no trouble,” Ratzlaff said.
No Detail Too Small
For the next eighteen months, Ratzlaff’s team had a weekly meeting with Jobs during which they’d show him their latest mockups. For each element of the new interface—the menus, the dialogs, the radio buttons—Jobs requested several variations so that he could select the best ones. As we’ll see in more detail later, Jobs always asks for multiple versions of products in development—both hardware and software. During the meetings with Ratzlaff, Jobs gave lots of feedback for refining the designs, and only when he was satisfied could features be ticked off.
The design team’s mockups, in Macromedia Director, were dynamic, but they weren’t functioning software. Jobs could open and close windows, pull down menus, and see how the system would work. But they were only animations. They weren’t working code. The team had the working code running on another machine that was placed next to the Director demo. When they’d show the working code to Jobs, he’d lean forward, his nose to the screen, and examine them closely, moving from the demo to the prototype and back again.
“He would compare them pixel by pixel to see if they matched,” Ratzlaff said. “He was way down into the details. He would scrutinize everything, down to the pixel level.” If they didn’t match, Ratzlaff said, “some engineer would get yelled at.”
Incredibly, Ratzlaff’s team spent six months refining the scrollbars to Jobs’s satisfaction. Scrollbars are an important part of any computer operating system but are hardly the most visible element of the user interface. Nonetheless, Jobs insisted the scrollbars look just so, and Ratzlaff’s team had to design version after version. “It had to be done right,” said Ratzlaff, laughing at the effort that went into such a seemingly minor detail.
At first, the design team found it very difficult to get the scrollbar details true. The little arrows were the wrong size, or in the wrong place, or the color was off. The scrollbars had to look different if the window was the currently active window or one of the background windows. “It was pretty hard to get them to fit with the rest of the design in all these different states,” Ratzlaff said with a note of weariness in his voice. “We kept at it until it was right. We worked on it for a long, long time.”
Simplifying the UI
OS X’s interface was designed with new users in mind. Because the system would be new to everyone—even veteran Mac users—Jobs focused on simplifying the interface as much as possible. For example, in the old Mac OS, most of the settings that