In this post I summarize some key points from the podcast episode from A16z called “Inside Apple Software Design” in which Frank Chen interviews Ken Kocienda, a longtime software engineer and designer at Apple. I chose to write this post about design at Apple because the company so consistently and unanimously excels at producing high quality product designs.
Grade I gave myself for this assignment: 88/100
The podcast starts by centering the conversation around the fact that over the last ~30 years Apple has been uniquely focused on creating intuitive and delightful product experiences, with Steve Jobs & other team members explicitly declaring that their aim has been to put a smile on users’ faces with their designs.
Kocienda explains that in the early years of iPhone development, Jobs drove a lot of the intent. At that time, it was a small, highly confidential team of around 30 engineers and designers, in which either Jobs would have been considered the sole product manager of the iPhone, or that all 30 engineers and designers could have been considered product managers in addition to their main roles. This underlines how much faith the team had in each other and their skills, which they get into later.
One key challenge that the team faced ahead of the first release of the phone was how to design a keyboard that would fit on the screen while accounting for the fact that the keys would each be smaller than a human finger tip and didn’t give the same tactile feedback as a physical button. They considered a few options, such as putting multiple letters per key, or providing autocorrect to change words to what the phone thought users were trying to say. In the end, they realized that they would undoubtedly need to use software to supplement the keystrokes to help interpret what users were trying to say. They were in part inspired by the Japanese input method, which at its core allows users to type based on the phonetic sounds of words rather than exact characters.
Kocienda then discusses the power that he experienced in having such a small team working on the iPhone, as it enabled a deep sense of cohesion and collaboration. However, he notes that small teams have key limitations, including the potential for a lack of skills and an inevitable lack of diversity. He notes that this is particularly problematic for teams designing products that have as wide of a target user base as the iPhone.
The next topic they discuss is how the iPhone team was able to so consistently make tasteful decisions. Kocienda explains that they focused their energy on the quality of team members and features over quantity; he even points out that the copy-paste function didn’t even make the cut until the third iteration of the iPhone. The team repeatedly focused on simplifying problems and features whenever possible, and they aimed to rely on the expertise of each team member.
One way this was apparent was during feature demos, in which team members would share a production-ready feature to Jobs to get his approval or feedback. Often during these demos Jobs would ask for the opinion of the demonstrator and actually end up using whatever they suggested, exhibiting his faith in their judgment due to their relative proximity to the issue.
Another notable aspect of feature demos to Jobs was that he never wanted explanations or pitches for features; rather, he just wanted to independently experience features as if he was a first-time user in the wild. This allowed him to judge how intuitive and delightful the feature might be for users rather than becoming biased by what the designers and engineers intended for the experience to be. This was one of many ways, explains Kocienda, that Jobs was able to artfully combine classical engineering and liberal arts styles of problem solving.
One of the last things they discuss in the podcast was how the iPhone team was able to land on a size for the home screen icons. After classic experiments failed to produce a conclusive answer, one engineer designed a game involving users quickly tapping rectangles of different sizes, and it was able to gather enough feedback on appropriate rectangle-tapping sizes that the team could determine that the icons should be 57 square pixels.
Overall, this episode reiterated to me the importance of value-setting from leadership, as it seems that the iPhone team’s consistent focus on simple, intuitive, and high quality designs was only possible due to equally consistent expectations set by Jobs.
Thanks for reading.
Works Cited
“Inside Apple Software Design.” A16z. 28 April 2022. Spotify.
BYOMSPM 
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