Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [21]
Jobs is extremely customer-centric. In interviews, he has said the starting point for the iPod wasn’t a small hard drive or a new chip, but the user experience. “Steve made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content,” Jonathan Ive said about the iPod. “It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device—which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren’t obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.”4
One of the most important parts of Apple’s design process is simplification. The simplicity of Apple’s products stems from choices being taken away from the customer. For Jobs, less is always more. “As technology becomes more complex, Apple’s core strength of knowing how to make very sophisticated technology comprehensible to mere mortals is in even greater demand,” he told the Times.5
Former CEO John Sculley said Jobs concentrated as much on what was left out as on the stuff that was included. “What makes Steve’s methodology different than everybody else’s is that he always believed that the most important decisions you make are not the things that you do, but the things you decide not to do,” Sculley told me.6
A study by Elke den Ouden of the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands found that nearly half of the products returned by consumers for refunds are in perfect working order, but their new owners couldn’t figure out how to use them. She discovered that the average American consumer would fumble with a new device for only twenty minutes before giving up and returning it to the store. This was true of cell phones, DVD players, and MP3 players. More surprisingly, she asked several managers from Philips (the Dutch electronics giant is one of her clients) to take home a handful of products and use them over the weekend. The managers, most of them tech savvy, failed to get the products to work. “Product developers, brought in to witness the struggles of average consumers, were astounded by the havoc they created,” she wrote.
Den Ouden concluded that the products had been poorly defined in the early design stage: no one had clearly articulated what the product’s primary function was to be. As a result, designers heaped on the features and capabilities until the products became a confusing mess. This is an all too common story in consumer electronics and software design. Engineers tend to create products that only they themselves can understand. Witness early MP3 players like Creative’s Nomad Jukebox, which had an inscrutable interface that only a nerd could love.
Many consumer electronics products are designed with the notion that more features mean better value. Engineers are often pressured to add features to new versions of their products, which are marketed as “new and improved.” A lot of this feature creep is driven by consumer expectations. Newer models are expected to have new capabilities; otherwise, where’s the incentive to upgrade? Plus, customers tend to look for devices with the most features. More features equals better value. Apple tries to resist this. The first iPod had the hardware for FM radio and voice recording, but these features were not implemented, lest they complicate the device. “What’s interesting is that out of that simplicity, an almost . . . unashamed sense of simplicity, and expressing it, came a very different product,” Ive said. “But difference wasn’t the goal. It’s actually very easy to create a different thing. What was exciting is starting to realize that its difference was really a consequence of this quest to make it a very simple thing.”
A lot of companies like to say they’re customer-centric. They approach their