The Apple Design Process

My friend John pointed me towards this story about the apple design process from Tech Beat. It was presented at SXSW a few weeks ago by Michael Lopp, a senior engineering manager at Apple. He has a blog of his own, which looks to be full of interesting observations on how technology is changing the way we go about our lives.  I just added it to my feed reader.

It a brief article and on the surface a lot of it sounds like a slightly fancier flavor of a vanilla design process. Like French Vanilla. The one thing that jumped out as being really different is the 10-3-1 design mantra. Apparently apple designers actually do pixel perfect mockups for 10 different UI choices for their products.

In my experiences, I’ve rarely seen more than 3 different choices. I think forcing people to think up 10 different ways of doing something is bound to get the creative juices flowing. Whats more is that if the mocks are pixel-perfect, they can also go a long way at generating buy-in and excitement for whichever design is selected.

It’s worth a quick read.

Posted: April 7th, 2008 | Author: Rob | Filed under: email | No Comments »

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