Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [22]
John Sculley told me that Jobs always focused on the user experience. “He always looked at things from the perspective of what was the user’s experience going to be,” Sculley said. “But unlike a lot of people in product marketing in those days who would go out and do consumer testing, asking people what they wanted, Steve didn’t believe in that. He said, ‘How can I possibly ask someone what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphics-based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.’”7
Creativity in art and technology is about individual expression. Just as an artist couldn’t produce a painting by conducting a focus group, Jobs doesn’t use them either. Jobs can’t innovate by asking a focus group what they want—they don’t know what they want. Like Henry Ford once said: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”
Patrick Whitney, director of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design, the United States’ biggest graduate school of design, said user groups aren’t suited to technology innovation. Traditionally, the tech industry has conducted carefully controlled studies on new products, especially interfaces. These Human Computer Interaction studies are usually conducted after a product has been designed, to see what works as anticipated and what needs refining. By definition, these studies need users who are unfamiliar with the technology, or they will skew the study. “User groups need naïve users,” Whitney explained. “But these users can’t tell you what they want. You have to watch them to discover what they want.”
Whitney said Sony would never have invented the Walkman if it had listened to its users. The company actually conducted a lot of research before releasing it. “All the marketing data said the Walkman was going to fail. It was unambiguous. No one would buy it. But [founder Akio] Morita pushed it through anyway. He knew. Jobs is the same. He has no need for user groups because he is a user-experience expert.”8
“We have a lot of customers, and we have a lot of research into our installed base,” Jobs told Business Week. “We also watch industry trends pretty carefully. But in the end, for something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”9
Jobs is Apple’s one-man focus group. One of his great strengths is that he’s not an engineer. Jobs has no formal training in engineering or programming. He doesn’t have a business degree. In fact, he doesn’t have a degree at all. He’s a college dropout. Jobs doesn’t think like an engineer. He thinks like a layman, which makes him the perfect test bed for Apple’s products. He is Apple’s Everyman, the ideal Apple customer. “Technically he’s at the serious hobbyist level,” said Dag Spicer, a senior curator with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. “He had no formal training, but he’s followed technology since a teenager. He’s technically aware enough to follow trends, like a good stock analyst. He has a layman’s view. It’s a great asset.”10
Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s former chief evangelist, told me that the budget at Apple for focus groups and market research is a negative number—and he was only slightly exaggerating. Apple, like most corporations, does spend money on researching its customers, but Jobs certainly doesn’t poll users when developing new products. “Steve Jobs doesn’t do market research,” Kawasaki said. “Market research for Steve Jobs is the right hemisphere talks to