Level 1 Secrets of Apple’s design process

During a presentation at 2008 South by Southwest festival, audience members got a rare glimpse into Apple’s design process. The presentation was given by Michael Lopp, senior engineering manager at Apple. According to Lopp, the process involves:
Pixel Perfect Mockups, a.k.a. prototyping. Admitedly this process takes a significant amount of time but it is akin to a magical wand that eliminates ambiguity and removes needs for correcting any mistakes down in the process.

10 to 3 to 1. Apple designers start with ten mockups for any product or feature, with room to design without restriction. They start to apply the various restrictions (design aesthetics, projected pricing, user friendly UI, etc) whittle that number to three, spend more months on those three and then finally end up with one strong design.

Paired Design Meetings. According to Lopp, each week the designers have two meetings. The first is to brainstorm without boundaries, letting their imaginations and ideas reach heights without any constraints through free thought. The second is a production meeting, which is an antithesis to the first. This meeting is to work out how a crazy idea from the first might actually work. This process and organization continues throughout the development of any app or product. The designers are mindful to keep an option for creative thought even at a late stage of the product development, even if the production meetings start to dominate the development process as the product comes closer to reality.

Pony Meeting. When senior managers describe their desires of a product to the design team, they are really expressing ideas of products that they think they want, a.k.a. they want their Pony. These pony wishes are most times very vague and mildly put unthought through. Apple designers, take the best ideas from the paired design meetings and present those to leadership, who might just decide that some of those ideas are, in fact, their longed-for ponies. In this way, the ponies morph into deliverables. In this way a balance in achieved where the leadership feel involved by seeing some of their ponies come to life, and the designers deliver on functional, shiny, products.

Although the design process is just that, the design phase; such practice speaks to a recursive process of refining high caliber thoughts that survive the high caliber scrutiny by such talented people. Most organizations today, cut corners in this very crucial phase of product development. They believe, if the construction of product is done iteratively then all mistakes will be caught through repetitive testing, and they will come away with an excellent product.

A bad, unthought and unrefined design, plagues a product through each cycle no matter how repetitively it is built and tested. Design is the granurality that persists in the very nature of the product. If the design is bad so is the very granular aspect of the product.

Despite additional time and cost, the design of a product must be seen as an investment, it has direct impact on the ROI of the product. Any shortcut taken in this phase can and does lead to significant disasters down the line. We can learn this by observing the designing pattern from design leaders like Apple.

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