Apple's Design Culture: What Steve Jobs Really Did

The article delves into the essence of Apple's remarkable design culture and explores the key role Steve Jobs played in shaping it. It analyzes how Jobs, as the Chief Design Advocate, prioritized product desirability above business and engineering goals, establishing a unique philosophy that has become synonymous with Apple.

IDEO's Product Framework

The article introduces IDEO's perspective on new product development, emphasizing the importance of desirability, feasibility, and viability as key drivers in product success. This framework, illustrated through a diagram, highlights how these factors are interwoven into the functional parts of a business.

• Viability: Represents the business focus, including marketing, finance, funding potential, distribution, and metrics.
• Feasibility: Represents the engineering focus, encompassing programming languages, development stacks, cool technologies, and engineering processes like agile.
• Desirability: Represents the design focus, encompassing context, culture, customer goals, product experience, design aesthetics, and interactions.

Business-Focused Product Perspective: Viability

The article explores the business-oriented perspective on product development, where the emphasis lies on factors like "hot markets," making money, funding potential, distribution, and metrics. The author argues that this approach often prioritizes analytical discussions around the business, sometimes overshadowing the core user experience itself.

Engineering-Focused Product Perspective: Feasibility

The article examines the engineering-focused product perspective, where the focus shifts towards technical aspects like programming language, development stack, cool technologies, and engineering processes. The author highlights how frameworks like agile, scrum, and open source fall into this category.

Design-Focused Product Perspective: Desirability

The article emphasizes the design-focused product perspective, where the primary concern is creating a compelling and desirable product experience for the user. This approach involves understanding the user's context, culture, and goals, conducting user research, developing personas, and rapidly prototyping multiple product concepts.

Apple's Desirability-Driven Approach

The article explains that Steve Jobs, as Apple's CEO, exemplified the design-focused perspective, placing product desirability above other considerations. He played the role of Chief Design Advocate, ensuring that Apple's products were "insanely great" by recruiting a top design team, protecting them from competing goals, and demonstrating a willingness to invest in achieving highly desirable products.

Key Takeaways

The article concludes that Apple's design culture can be emulated by any company, regardless of size or industry. By prioritizing design and desirability, and placing it on equal footing with engineering and business goals, companies can create truly remarkable product experiences.

Building Your Own Design-Driven Culture

The author encourages readers to adopt a design-focused approach, embracing the tools and frameworks of design thinking to prioritize desirability and create products that truly resonate with users.