Book Review - Creative Selection
Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s design process during the golden age of Steve Jobs
Author: Ken Kocienda | Genre: Non fictional
 |
|---|
| Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s design process during the golden age of Steve Jobs 1 |
The book follows us through the different processes, designs, and prototypes of making products in Apple from a product engineer’s perspective. Ken describes his journey as the first developers of Safari, web emails, and then Direct Responsible person for designing the keyboard for Purple project (secret name of iPhone project in the early days).
Every chapter describes the progress in the projects he was making while in Apple, with the demos and positive criticisms that made him keep working on the end goal. Ken makes a non-tech reader understand the idea behind the selection of a specific design using simple analogies, for example, stacking objects in the fridge to explain about optimization. He also reveals the importance of demos to give a ‘concrete and progressive’ idea before the executives allow them to move ahead in development.
At the end of the final shipping of the iPhone, he talks about his perspective of taste described by Immanuel Kant2. Here comes the significant line of Steve Jobs during his iPod interview - “Design is that what works” when explaining the perspective of people about technologies to be beautiful3.
He also talks about the subtle management politics when someone else was made the management head of the Safari team. But soon he realized he wasn’t the type of guy who could handle management tasks when he was made the head of the Sync team. He also candidly describes the mental condition of programmers when they couldn’t see their progress, which often led to cussing colleagues or breaking doorknobs. He describes the moments of euphoria when achieving progress in the development of the safari project or the keyboard when they faced deadends.
At the end of the book, he describes the reasons for the iPhone to be a successful product. He mentions the important role of creative selection among demos and designs, and the collaborative culture among the teams. Another key aspect was keeping heuristics along with software development, made iPhone/iPad tech more user friendly. Unlike many other tech companies who kept an engineers team different from the heuristics or human interactions team, failing to provide a more subtle usage of their products. For example, Google investigated around 20 different shades of blue color, to check the likeliness of it to be clicked.
In the last chapters, key points to remember for a successful product designing is listed out along with his last iPad keyboard demonstration to Steve, before he died. The last chapter ends with advice to young product development engineers - to “get busy and decide what it means to do great work and make it happen”. An amazing read for young technology savvy youth!!