It won’t come as a surprise for a generic world-class electronics company to squirm at the mere motion of discontinuing any present-day technology that is evidently in rampant use with its current user-base, including peripherals or hardware systems. Imagine the plight of several million loyal customers when they hear how their favourite features and functions have been impertinently withdrawn with immediate effect from the brand’s high-end product line. But of course, we aren’t talking about Apple.
Here’s what everybody, including most designers, gets it completely wrong about Apple whenever the discussion surrounding its deeply intricate ‘design philosophy’ happens. There will be an unequivocal and optimistic pronouncement that Apple’s success is due to its “user-first” mindset. It’s not and it never was. On the contrary, Apple’s innovation strategy is ingrained in making its products future-proof by pursuing a ‘design-first’ framework in a valiant effort to promote and invest in technologies, which in Steve Jobs’ prophetic words, are having an upwards swing. That pursuit of integrating innovative technology is partly the reason why some of their design decisions seem impractical and in complete contradiction to current technical norms. The unpopular decision behind the removal of the headphone jacks from the iPhone 7, for instance, was necessary to make the device thinner and add space for larger batteries in a world that is hankering for more juice. That single design change has virtually turned the tide towards wireless Bluetooth headset manufacturers and prompted iPhone buyers to shop for them (read, ‘AirPods’) and has sparked a wave of innovation in the industry.
[…]Apple is a company that doesn’t have the resources that everyone else has. We choose what tech horses to ride, we look for tech that has a future and is headed up. Different pieces of tech go in cycles… they have their springs, and summers and autumns, and…then they go to their graveyard of technology. And..so we try to pick things that are in their ‘springs’ and if you choose wisely you can save yourself enormous amount of work versus trying to do everything, and you can really put energy into making those new emerging technologies be great on your platform rather than just ‘ok’ because you’re spreading yourself too thin. […] So we have got rid of things..we were one of the first to get rid of the optical drives with the MacBook Air, and I think things are moving in that direction as well. And sometimes when we get rid of things like the floppy disk drive on the original iMac people call us crazy. But sometimes you just have to pick the things that look like they’re gonna be the right horses to ride going forward.
Steve Jobs – D8 conference, 2010.
So, where modern PC brands were feverishly banking on the ubiquitous USB Type-A on the basis of its adoption rate and the competition Apple boldly moved forward to replace them with USB type-Cs on their Mac devices. It’s a debate for another day that Apple’s ‘design-first’ decision on the 2015 MacBook also prompted an extravagant usage of physical adapters to attach almost any 3rd-party Type-A peripheral on almost every major device launch.
What is a ‘Design First‘ approach?
The ‘design first’ philosophy has been widely popularized by companies like Apple and Google and enumerates that all things should be designed with the purpose of enhancing the end user experience. Historically, IT systems and products have been built around user expectations, or rather how the user wants the product/system to behave. The outcome is heavily reliant on user research for gaining deep insights into behaviour, attitudes & needs, etc. In contrast, a ‘design first’ approach relies on the knowledge of an expert to lead a team, from conceptualizing through to the implementation.
A ‘design first’ approach for innovation has its roots in maintaining and translating the basic notions of systems and demographics into concepts, which might be completely independent of the market forces but are substantially different, and validating those concepts based on the presupposed experience of working in similar situations. So in simple terms, the validation of ideas is based on Priori reasoning more than empirical evidence.
Apple’s ‘Design First’ Effect
Over the past decade or so, Apple has introduced numerous features in their product line & services decidedly to resolve user problems and to streamline workflows in order to increase efficiency. The Touch Bar is an example of increased access to program-related features, such as on the Sketch app, to enhance user productivity from struggling to recall complex commands. In the same manner, the company also decided to do away with many latent features which had unknowingly become ubiquitous with Apple’s innovative design approach, there’s a long list such as, the Magsafe adaptor, the 8-light battery indicator MacBook Pros, the battery indicator on the charging cable, HDMI ports on the MacBook Pro, DVD drives, and lastly, the USB ports. As I mentioned earlier, on the iPhones as well, the headphone jack was removed, then the TouchID-enabled home button was duly replaced by a more stringent FaceID technology running through a bionic chip. On technology, Apple didn’t even introduce Flash on their iDevices at a time when Flash
It’s no surprise at all that some of those design decisions haven’t gone favourably with Apple’s customer base and the company has received tremendous flak for its ‘one-sided’ decisions. It has also invariably affected the way people have traditionally interacted with their personal devices and changed user behaviour to a great extent. One of the core assets of Apple is that understands the criticality of adopting technology that is on its ascent and shows a lot of promise going forward, the Flash vs HTML 5 is a great example. While peripherals and hardware services suffer due to these decisions the industry collectively could only thrive if the product is able to carry elements & functions which can delight the user and enhance the experience.
It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do. So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me “A faster horse”.
Steve Jobs – CNNMoney/Fortune, February 2008.
