Among the achievements of Steve Jobs, the elevation of user experience design to the point that we might almost call this the Age of User Experience. Let’s consider the iPhone. Here are the technologies that went into making it a practical consumer item:
- plastic molding (Leo Baekeland)
- stored-program computer (Turing, von Neumann)
- transistor (Bell Labs)
- integrated circuit (Fairchild)
- LCD screen (RCA, Westinghouse)
- cell phone network (Bell Labs, Nokia, Motorola, Siemens, Ericsson)
- Global Positioning System (U.S. military and The Aerospace Corporation)
- pocket computer (Sharp, Palm, Apple Newton, others?)
- multi-tasking operating system (MIT)
- Unix (Bell Labs)
- graphical user interface (Xerox PARC)
- MP3 player (various)
- app phone (Danger (became T-Mobile Sidekick))
Aside from the pocket computer, neither Apple nor Steve Jobs had anything to do with the development of any of these technologies, yet details that an engineer would regard as tiny turned out to make a huge difference in market acceptance and profitability. Business managers can no longer ignore such details.
Anyone today who has a job in user experience should therefore thank Steve Jobs.
Your post is a great insight, Philip – on the creative significance of connecting the dots into a unifying service.
“Business managers can no longer ignore such details.”
Sadly, I just don’t think that’s true. Most companies prioritize management by share value, and design by MBAs. Maximizing user experience and user value as a strategy to maximize long run profit is rarely seen as a winning path.
How else to explain the Zune or a bazillion Android handsets, $25 per bag luggage fees, or 99% of the products we have to deal with?
In fact, I suspect that few business managers can afford to act like Steve Jobs and run their company and design their products in such an autocratic manner and expect to keep their own jobs long.
Pulling back the licensing of MacOS, refusing to sell low end iPhones, and still become the biggest company. Who could do that? Would shareholders and boards ever let anyone else take that risk?
“Neither Apple nor Steve Jobs had anything to do with the development of any of these technologies,”
I don’t think that’s fair on the GUI. Apple’s Mac UI significantly improved upon what was seen at PARC and included innovations not imagined at PARC. Too few people realize that some of Apple’s engineers had been working on the GUI concept from before the PARC tour, even from before their employment at Apple. The tour simply fired up Jobs about the idea.
The iOS UI pushed the GUI forward yet again. There really wasn’t anything like it before.
That said, it is interesting to think about all the scientific knowledge and technological development required to make the iPhone possible. Steve Jobs was innovative, but he stood on the shoulders of giants.
Synthesizing the pieces to create something larger and much grander than the sum of its parts is always involved in creation. The english language, bricks and mortar, the principles of flight, are all used to create some pretty spectacular things. The genius is in the syntax, architecture, airplane. The devil is in the details.
I’m sad.
Sad that people are spending so much time on a man that took other people’s ideas and made them easier to use. Great, so he improved the lives of the top 1% of the world population. Big deal.
Let’s hope there’s more outpouring of emotion when someone like Muhammad Yunus passes away. He’s a true visionary and his selfless actions affect the people who need it most, the poorest of the poor.
IMO you should replace “Global Positioning System (U.S. military)” with”DGPS (US, Canadian Coast Guard and others)”. GPS did not become a practical consumer item thank to US military.
Well, that leaves Amazon, Facebook, and Google as the major “playaz” in the whole computer nets thing. Everyone hates Facebook and they have nothing real to offer except their inertia in having got 500M members. That leaves Amazon and Google, who do not really compete with each other. Amazon sells consumer goods and Google amasses information. We live in a Google world and eat Amazon food.
Regarding “pocket computer”, Apple has a history there. Apple spent on the order of 100 million dollars developing the Newton (starting in 1987) which was released in 1993. Though ultimately not a commercial success, Newton did substantially advance the state of the art in hardware and software and third-party app development for pocket computers, popularized the term “PDA” (first used by John Scully), and paved the way for later efforts including those of Palm. Palm’s first product was actually a software program (Graffiti) which ran on the Newton – they didn’t come out with their own pocket computing device until 1996.
Palm did to Apple what Apple later did to Palm – came out with a simpler product that in many ways *did less*, but did a few things especially well and was easier to sell.
So it’s true you can’t credit *Jobs* specifically – he wasn’t at Apple at the time – but you can give Apple quite a lot of credit for showing what a pocket computer could be way back then. Come to think of it: Newton, General Magic, and Palm were *all* products developed largely by current or former Apple employees who had worked on the original Macintosh – people like Steve Capps, Susan Kare, Andy Hertzfeld. There were some predecessors and contemporary unrelated efforts one might point to – Psion, the Casio Zoomer, various glorified calculators (Sharp) or glorified word processors (Tandy), but you can’t really credit Palm’s contribution without also crediting Apple’s.
It’s a mistake to call the iPhone screen just “an LCD screen”.
The touchscreen plus the Cocoa API for multitouch was a huge step forward beyond anything else at the time (2007) and the single hardest thing to get right. Android still doesn’t have something as good as the original iPhone’s touch interface, even four years later.
Think about how hard that is/was to achieve from an engineering and materials science perspective. It had to be scratch and shock proof, mass produceable, inexpensive, giving off little heat and using little power, with an *extremely* consistent touch interface (in both space and time).
Regarding the development of the modern GUI, there were many features the Mac team came up with that the Xerox Star didn’t have at the time (eg: overlapping windows, a trash can, click-and-drag file manipulation…) and there was a fair amount of independent invention or even *prior* invention going on with respect to other features. A couple relevant links:
http://mxmora.best.vwh.net/JefRaskin.html
http://www.mackido.com/Interface/ui_horn1.html
Pretty good encapsulation of Steve’s contribution, you have given. I have had on occasions read this blog and always found very balanced view points.
The same Steve who had devoted so much of energy to elevate user experience had, in my humble opinion, had locked in the user too, in variety of ways.
Kumar: I don’t think that locking in a user is inconsistent with elevating user experience. The locked-in user will have a simpler experience. Where can I buy music for my Android phone? Anywhere in the world! How do I decide which of the 1000 competing vendors is best? It’s complicated. How about for an iPhone? There is just one source and therefore it is a lot simpler to purchase.
Obviously the locked-in user is subject to gradual impoverishment and I guess you could say that his user experience is degraded by a reduced spending ability. But that won’t bother him so much while he is actually using his device.
Phil: I’m not sure that the so called “locked-in” user is subject to gradual impoverishment. What are the cost/time benefits of being easily organized?
Android makes money on advertising and selling your user data to other companies in order for them to scientifically entice you to buy more stuff that you may not need. It’s not “free”. When you scratch the surface, it may be that Android “freely” manipulates. Furthermore, user experience is everything. How much of the world would be enraptured by computers if GUI had not been created and highly refined? What is that user experience worth? You get what you pay for. The market has spoken (and continues to speak).