[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KggyHTY1mIA]
UX designer Joseph Shaffery shared some quotes from a talk Apple’s design head Jony Ive gave (another account) to an audience of designers last night at London’s Design Museum – together with his take on the three top tips a designer should take away from the evening …
Shaffery said that the three key take-outs from the evening were:
- Learn how to care
- Learn how to focus
- Be prepared to screw up and throw things away
On caring, Ive said that failing to care enough about the work you are doing is personally offensive.
What we make testifies who we are. People can sense care and can sense carelessness. This relates to respect for each other and carelessness is personally offensive.
On focus:
Make each product the best it can be. Focus on form and materials. What we don’t include is as important as what we do include […]
There is a clear goal and it isn’t to make money. The goal is to desperately try to make the best products we can. We are not naive – if you trust it, people like it, they buy it and we make money. This is a consequence.
On failing:
Shouldn’t be afraid to fail- if we are not failing we are not pushing. 80% in the studio is not going to work. If something is not good enough, stop doing it.
Ive also repeated comments he’s made in the past about his attitude to copycats.
Eight years of work can be copied in six months. It wasn’t inevitable that it was going to work. A stolen design is stolen time. Is it flattering? No.
A few more quotes can be found on Shaffery’s blog. Sadly, the Design Museum says there are no plans to post a video of the entire talk. The full video of a recent Vanity Fair interview with Ive is, however, available.
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Always glad to hear something new from Jony Ive. Very inspiring.
Deep stuff.
This Man Gets IT!
“We shouldn’t be afraid to fail – if we are not failing we are not pushing.”
I’ve learned far more from my failures than my successes. And my successes have almost always been the result of learning from my failures!
Truly a genius.
While I like his hardware designs, but I’ve lost a great deal of respect for the man after the interface atrocities he’s visited on iOS and now OS X, especially following the complaints of users. By ignoring these complaints he just comes across as a self-important narcissist too convinced of his own superiority to listen to the rabble.
Which complaints exactly? Yosemite has like a 5-star rating in the App Store and iOS8 is the highest rated iOS version behind iOS2 when the App Store came out.
Do you really not remember howls of outrage when iOS 7 came out with skeuomorphism replaced by dead flatness?!
Yosemite took an OS that had nothing wrong with the look and feel and handed us a flat and lifeless interface mixed with garish transparency and menu icons that are hires versions of the 1 bit icons used in the first Mac OS. He basically threw away the book on human interface guidelines and did things his own way.
I don’t have to stare at my iPhone all day long, but I do stare at the computer for hours on end and the experience went from where I could ignore the interface and do my work to having interface elements become distracting. For instance folders in the dock had an innocuous dark background, now it’s glaring white.
In recent years OS X had found a happy medium that no one was complaining about. Jony Ive just changed things for no other reason than he could, completely ignoring the number of complaints received about his makeover of iOS 7. A lot of people hated it, he didn’t care, and then did it to OS X.
Apple needs to get Jony Ive away from software, put him back on hardware where he belongs and find a really good graphic designer and give them the book on Human Interface Guidelines that is sitting in Ive’s newly redesigned trashcan.
I recently took out my iPhone 4 with iOS 6 on it. For a brief second, I could help how the OS looked 10 years old compared to iOS 7.
A phone operating system is different than computer operating system. I don’t know about you, but I don’t stare at my phone all day long. I do however stare at my computer all day long. Having all menu icons in 2-D monochrome is harsh on the eyes. Just in mail having the numbers of messages in various mailboxes in black-and-white on dull gray instead of more subdued colors is very distracting.
If you think iOS 6 looks 10 years old many parts of Yosemite look 30 years old and take a large step backwards in usability. Apple needs to hire a graphic designer and have him study the human interface guidelines Ive discarded. Minimalism may be fine for hardware and sometimes software can use a touch of minimalism but Yosemite is a few steps too far.