Creative Selection

f you ever wondered why iPhones and iPads often show 9:41 as the time on the lock screen and in the status bar in ads and posters, the reason is that the Apple keynotes were often planned out to do the biggest product introduction about forty minutes into the show. (Note that online videos of these presentations omit clips of copyrighted material from music, TV shows, and movies, so the times are off.) The idea was to have the time in the marketing photos of the new product match, or at least be close to, the actual time in the hall at the moment of the reveal. So it was for the iPhone. After that, using 9:41 became a tradition, perhaps a superstition. Apple Watch uses 10:09 for a totally different reason—that’s just how the designers thought the hands looked best, especially on analog faces. Go figure.

Here’s the full list of the seven essential elements again, and this time, I’ve supplemented them with specific examples drawn from my stories:
Inspiration, which means thinking big ideas and imagining about what might be possible, as when Imran saw how smooth finger tracking would be the key to people connecting to iPhone experiences through touch
Collaboration, which means working together well with other people and seeking to combine your complementary strengths, as when Darin and Trey helped me make the insertion point move correctly in WebKit word processing
Craft, which means applying skill to achieve high-quality results and always striving to do better, as when the Safari team made the web browser faster and faster by running the Page Load Test, trying to understand what this test program told us about our software, and using these findings to optimizing our code
Diligence, which means doing the necessary grunt work and never resorting to shortcuts or half measures, as when we persisted through the tedium of fixing cross-references to get Safari to build in the lead-up to the Black Slab Encounter
Decisiveness, which means making tough choices and refusing to delay or procrastinate, as when Steve Jobs made me pick the better keyboard layout for the iPad on the spot while he waited rather than just offering the two different designs Bas and I developed
Taste, which means developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole, as when we made the choice to offer a QWERTY keyboard layout for the iPhone
Empathy, which means trying to see the world from other people’s perspectives and creating work that fits into their lives and adapts to their needs, as when Scott Herz made a game to find the best size for touch targets so it was comfortable to tap the iPhone display and accommodated people with varying levels of dexterity

Child’s Play: The original slide-to-unlock feature helped to prevent you from unintentionally activating features when the phone was in your pocket or bag, and the slider-and-channel user interface to unlock was sufficiently intuitive that when Imran handed an iPhone to his daughter for the first time—she was about three years old—she looked at the screen for a moment and, with no prompting other than what the software showed her, she slid the control and unlocked the phone. No problem.

Warp: You might think that when you tap the iPhone screen, the tip of your finger touches the screen, but that isn’t so. Given the curved shape of our fingertips, the point of impact is actually lower, and it’s this spot on your finger that contacts the touchscreen first. The software modifies the geometry of your actual touch points, shifting or warping them upward to account for this difference, giving you a sense that your touch targeting is right on.

For example, we didn’t take two-hour coffee breaks or hold daylong offsite confabs to talk about projects without examples to ground the discussion—we didn’t have lengthy discussions about whose imaginary puppy was cuter

We gave each other feedback, both as initial impressions and after living on the software to test the viability of the ideas and quality of the associated implementations. We gathered up action items for the next iteration, and then we forged ahead toward the next demo. I’ve given a name to this continuing progression of demo -> feedback -> next demo: creative selection

At Apple, we never would have dreamed of doing that, and we never staged any A/B tests for any of the software on the iPhone. When it came to choosing a color, we picked one. We used our good taste—and our knowledge of how to make software accessible to people with visual difficulties related to color perception—and we moved on

On the tenth of January 2007, the day after the big product introduction, I edited the autocorrection dictionary to add a new word: iPhone

Whiteboard discussions feel like work, but often they’re not, since it’s too difficult to talk productively about ideas in the abstract. Think of a cute puppy

We didn’t do this on the Purple project. We rarely had brainstorming sessions. I recall only a few times in my entire Apple career when I stood around to rough out big plans at a whiteboard