At the time of his death, Steve Jobs had created the world’s most valuable company and had helped to revolutionise seven separate industries being personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, digital publishing and Retail stores.
To summarise the edict of the late Steve Jobs and his philosophy towards product design:
Stay focused. Decide what not to do.
Pick 10 things we should be doing next. Cross out 7 of them. Do 3.
Get rid of products or features that aren’t great. They’re dragging you down.
Adequate is not good. Aim for great.
Obsess on design. It must be beautiful. Packaging matters. Packaging creates perception of value. Opening the product / software for the first time is the most important moment.
Simplify. Remove things. To make things beautifully simple, you must “go deep”. Engineer for simplicity from the ground up.
Sweat the small stuff. Error messages should be few, human, and hopeful. “Fatal error” is not human, and not hopeful. It is a fatal error.
You’ve got to love it. If you don’t love it, you haven’t got it quite right yet.
Aim for perfection “inside the box”, too, where nobody will ever see. In the code. Write code you’d want to sign your name to….
In-still in your team that you expect them to do great things, and you will get them to do great things.
In closing, the man behind Apple possessed a vision that knew no bounds – and he looked for this in his people too quoting:
“While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
That you did Mr Jobs, that you did………..
Walter Isaacson – Author of ‘Steve Jobs’
