Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [20]
Apple’s QuickTime player was an early example of software that benefited from an interface rethink. Used to play multimedia files, mostly music and video, the player needed only a few controls for starting and pausing movies and adjusting the sound. It was decided that the QuickTime player should be one of the first pieces of Apple’s software to get a simple appliance-like interface.
The player’s interface was designed by Tim Wasko, a soft-spoken Canadian who later went on to design the iPod interface. He came to Apple from NeXT, where he’d worked with Jobs. Wasko is known at Apple as a design god. “He’s a total fiend at Photoshop,” said Hoddie. “You’d say, ‘What about this idea?’ and it’d be: click click, click”—Hoddie mimicked the sound of fingers flying across a keyboard—“and it was rendered already.”
The QuickTime player design team was made up of half a dozen designers and programmers, including Hoddie and Wasko. They met with Jobs once or twice a week over six months. Each week, the team would present a dozen or more new designs, often playing around with different textures and looks. Early ideas included a yellow plastic motif inspired by Sony’s Sport Walkman, and various wood or metal textures. Anything was game. “Steve is not a design radical, but he is willing to try new things,” said Hoddie.
At first, the designs were presented on a computer, but the team found that flashing them on and off screen was a laborious process, so they switched to printing out the designs on large glossy sheets of paper. The printouts were spread over a large conference table and could be quickly sorted through. Jobs and the designers found it easy to pick out the designs they liked from the pile, saying this texture should go with that shape. The method proved to be so effective that most of Apple’s designers have since adopted it.
After the meetings, Jobs would sometimes take away a handful of printouts and show them to other people. “He has great design sense, but he’s also listening,” said Hoddie.
After several weeks of playing around with different designs, Wasko came up with a metallic look, which Jobs liked but thought wasn’t quite right. At the next meeting Jobs showed up with a brochure from Hewlett-Packard with the HP logo in brushed metal, resembling a high-end kitchen appliance. “I like this one,” Jobs told the group. “See what you can do.”
The team came back with a brushed-metal look for the QuickTime player. For several years since, brushed metal was the predominant design motif used extensively across Apple’s software, plus its high-end hardware. Through the early 2000s, most of Apple’s applications were given a brushed-metal look, from the Safari web browser to the iCal calendar.
Jobs is intimately involved in the design process. He brings a lot of ideas to the table and always makes suggestions for improving designs. Jobs’s contribution is not just choosing what he likes and dislikes. “He’s not, ‘this is bad, this is good,’ ” said Hoddie. “He’s really part of the design.”
Deceptive Simplicity
Jobs is never interested in technology for technology’s sake. He never loads up on bells and whistles, cramming features into a product simply because they’re easy to add. Just the opposite. Jobs pares down the complexity of his products until they are as simple and easy to use as possible. Lots of Apple’s products are designed from the user’s point of view.
Take the iTunes online music store, which launched in 2001, at the height of the popularity of online file sharing. A lot of people asked at the time how the store would compete with piracy. Why would anyone spend $1 a song, when they could get the same song for free? Jobs’s answer was the “customer experience.” Instead of wasting time on the file-sharing networks trying to find songs, music fans could log on to iTunes and buy songs with a single click.