Apple has been known to make some of the best products that we have seen and continue to make innovative products with its breakthroughs. Ken Kocienda provides an insiders account of how Apple designs its products in his book Creative Selection. Through a variety of real-life incidents, ken explains the hardships of working under a very demanding manager and the taste of success that you get when you finally see the product that you work on gets used by millions of people with a smile on their face.
Ken explains an approach that is often used by apple though not given specifically or explicitly by anyone in the company but is followed by all employees at Apple. He calls this process Creative Selection. The seven main elements in the process are :
1. Inspiration: Thinking of big ideas that may change how people work.
2. Collaboration: Working with people together to get ideas, use each other’s strengths and cover each other weaknesses.
3. Craft: Strive To get high-quality results and to get better each time.
4. Diligence: To do the necessary hard work and not resort to short cuts.
5. Decisiveness: The ability to make decisions quickly and confidently and not to delay.
6. Taste: To judge and recognize what is good or suitable.
7. Empathy: The capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference.
Ken mentions an interesting incident that happened to him:
Ken wanted to give a specific sound for the keyboard click sound. He got inspired by how Ben Burtt made sound effects for the blaster shots by recording hammer strikes on a guy wire for an antenna tower for the first Stars Wars movie.
This is how the blaster shots for the movie were made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl0wIdGxfbQ
(Watch it at 1.5x speed for it to sound closer to how it’s heard in the movies)
Ken produced 2 variations called tick and tock. When demoed to Steve Jobs, Steve chose tock. The sound lasted unchanged through several versions of the iOS.
To gain insight into how apple did what they did, I highly recommend reading this book.
Reference: https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Selection-Inside-Apples-Process/dp/152900473X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1584867579&sr=8-1
