In the last few months there has been a lot of discussion of people’s hopes for the future of Apple. With the announced leadership changes, it is a logical period of reflection and projection of hopes for the future.
A recurring theme I’ve heard is a desire for Apple to “return to its roots” or “go back to what made it great”. I don’t personally feel those feelings very much. Maybe I’d describe its situation as a ship which has become a bit unbalanced by some structural choices and so is listing to the side, meaning it takes more intentional effort to stay on course. I would gladly appreciate it if new leadership were able to shift some ballast around to make the ship run truer, but the general direction remains unchanged.
A more productive line of thinking this conversation has prompted in me, which I’ve been ruminating on for weeks, is what exactly is Apple-like. What makes Apple…Apple?
I am proud to call myself an “Apple Developer” and not just because I develop on Apple platforms, but because for the 18 years I’ve been working on apps I’ve aspired towards building in a way which is Apple-like in style. I realized, however, that I didn’t have a very specific definition of what that actually meant, so over the course of a lot of walking and running in the hills around my house I have tried to narrow it down to a few concise maxims which summarize the type of company and products I want to aspire to building. I ended up with three goals which I think capture the essence of what being an Apple-like builder means to me.
The Best, and then Better
First and foremost there is a fundamental desire to make things in as high a quality way as is possible. To be constantly striving towards making things without cut corners or lazy compromises. That I’m essentially never satisfied with my work, and I am always thinking about how things could be better. The goal is to be the best in whatever category you are creating. You will never actually arrive, but this mindset clarifies thinking and helps keep you relentlessly improving.
It does, however, also create a situation which is incredibly dangerous. If you are always striving towards improving quality you will eventually end up with a surplus of user expectation. In my experience this surplus is incredibly precarious because once you are better than your competitors there will always be a temptation to let up on this pursuit and instead spend some of that surplus on things which don’t improve the user’s experience. It is so easy at this point to do the thing which worsens the user experience but helps the bottom line, with the justification that you’ll still be the best.
Which is why the second part of this maxim is that you have to not only strive to be the best, but then once you get ahead keep working on the marginal gains to relentlessly improve. You can’t just be “The Best”, you have to also still be always “Better”.
Excellence for Everyone
I want to create excellent products which are available to everyone. There are two primary ways I think about this, affordability and accessibility.
Apple products are not cheap, but I would argue that they are generally affordable (as shown by the literal billions of their products which have been sold). There is a big difference between something being expensive and being exclusive. Consider, for example, the difference between a Hermès Watch strap and an Apple-branded one. The former is exclusive in its pricing; the latter is simply expensive.
Price is one of the fundamental design considerations of a product. It directly determines a huge number of the aspects of a product. So often in my own work I’ve struggled with the feeling that “a cheap price is a better price”. I think something I’ve learned from the way Apple runs its business is that if price is the thing you are optimizing for then your product will inevitably suffer. You want a price which supports quality. However, things will go sideways if you ever move beyond expensive and start to be exclusionary in your pricing.
The other side of this relates to building products in a way that the widest number of possible people can use them. This can straightforwardly take the classic forms of accessibility like VoiceOver or Dynamic Type. But more often, it is just generally building products which can relate to as wide a cross section of the world as possible. I want to make designs which are intuitive and approachable. There is a time and place for complexity in an app, but for a design to be Apple-like it will usually hide that complexity behind opinionated choices which invite the user into a comfortable, confident use.
Beneficial and Brilliant
The products we all make should be beneficial for the lives of the users we are building them for and solve their problems in novel, delightful ways.
Building products which are so attractive to users that they want to spend meaningful amounts of their lives using them comes with a tremendous responsibility to make those experiences beneficial to those users. There are a huge array of psychologically manipulative ways we can affect our users while they use our apps, but these are typically beneficial to the developer, not the user.
The smartphone has such incredibly high daily usage in our lives that it can be a tremendous influence for either good or ill. There is an honesty in this area which is very important to constantly wrestle with. There are countless ways to improve the superficial measurements of a product’s success, which are not beneficial to our users. Instead, striving towards the most user benefit will likely be a slower impact in the short-term but a better one in the long-term.
This beneficial impact should, whenever possible, come in the form of brilliant solutions to problems users might not even be aware they have. This is the old “Surprise and Delight” design goal. This kind of design philosophy comes from a deeper understanding of what a user wants. Rather than just considering the superficial need, you dig a bit deeper until you find the brilliant solution to the fundamental need which will improve the user’s life.
The Compass
These three goals are in aggregate a useful north-star to consistently align design and development efforts. I know full well that the realities and pressures of life will make it impossible to actually ever attain them. The utility of a compass isn’t that it allows you to walk in a perfectly straight line, but instead that wherever you find yourself you’ll know which way to go to make progress towards your intended destination.