I think with Apple at least, it’s a sense of trusting the platform
to make all the right decisions for you; it’s what you pay for in part. That also leads to the interesting problem of users feeling betrayed instead of just annoyed when something isn’t right.
I ran a user feedback tool for help documentation when I was at apple, but people would just post whatever there greivences were about the product and not the documentation. It was very different user relationship than I had experienced before - there was immense trust, and lifestyle invested in the brand, and immense pressure as an engineer to live up to all these people’s expectations.
On the ground floor, we weren’t worried about missing earnings or slowing user growth, we were worried that “Bob” who runs his media company on a Mac will be frustrated by a change in numbers or iCloud, or that the new iPhone wouldn’t make people feel like they had the best technology in the world.
> there was immense trust, and lifestyle invested in the brand, and immense pressure as an engineer to live up to all these people’s expectations.
Agreed, and this emotional involvement goes a long way to explaining Apple's legendary margins and ability to sell upgrades with increasingly unexciting advancements.
> On the ground floor, we weren’t worried about missing earnings or slowing user growth, we were worried that “Bob” who runs his media company on a Mac will be frustrated by a change in numbers or iCloud, or that the new iPhone wouldn’t make people feel like they had the best technology in the world.
This seems much less true to me. There are many, many examples of poor design choices or imperfect implementations. A recent pet peeve of mine is that I simply cannot decipher how the Facetime contacts and call initiation design works. Somehow I got it working and now can pick a name from the recent calls list, but how I managed to get it to that state is utterly beyond me. This is an absolutely fundamental capability, and yet completely not clear.
This could be said about so many different aspects of Apple products that I find it hard to believe that concern for user happiness and understanding is really that big of an explicit concern. Rather, I suspect any concern is tangential to something else.
>>This could be said about so many different aspects of Apple products that I find it hard to believe that concern for user happiness and understanding is really that big of an explicit concern.
I can assure you it absolutely was in my experience. The problem is that there are so many of these issues and so much pressure to release new features that delight users that Apple has scaling pains.
It’s also possible that the C-Suite doesn’t think like that at all, as a grunt I had no insight into their actual motives. But I assumed the values they told us to uphold were genuine. It’s just really hard.
To this point, I’ll mention a talk Ive gave to new interns where he outlined the (then) controversy over the headphone design (the wired ones that come with your phone and slide into the ear). He was tasked with one earbud design, and for some people with different ears it just didn’t work. But for most people it was the most durable and best sound quality, yadda yadda. He talked about focusing on the majority case, making it as good as possible, and then giving a fallback that is also excellent (the old style rubber pad earbuds) for everyone else. Don’t be worried if someone does some niche better than you, he was saying, do the the absolute best for a large number of people and let other people own those niches.
> There are many, many examples of poor design choices or imperfect implementations.
I'm thinking this isn't a contradiction: that the designers are striving for user-centered design. But many Apple apps aren't allocated a dedicated team. New apps are given birth but then not recognized as a new "thing" that will require continuous maintenance and care.
And then I also imagine that many UX decisions are made by just one or two people, and fairly quickly. They're not taking the time to think about the app, and whether the interaction makes sense to someone not intimately involved.
At least - these are my guesses as someone not inside Apple.
I ran a user feedback tool for help documentation when I was at apple, but people would just post whatever there greivences were about the product and not the documentation. It was very different user relationship than I had experienced before - there was immense trust, and lifestyle invested in the brand, and immense pressure as an engineer to live up to all these people’s expectations.
On the ground floor, we weren’t worried about missing earnings or slowing user growth, we were worried that “Bob” who runs his media company on a Mac will be frustrated by a change in numbers or iCloud, or that the new iPhone wouldn’t make people feel like they had the best technology in the world.