A rare glimpse into Apple’s design process

Photo of Michael Lopp by wasabicube. Some rights reserved.

Peterme wrote a thoughtful piece a while back on “why Apple is bad for design” because they make it look so easy and they are so secretive about how they do it. Well, one of Apple’s engineering managers, Michael Lopp, allowed a rare glimpse into the Apple design process at the SXSW conference last month. His points are summarized in this BusinessWeek article.

Tastiest bits? Apparently the teams at Apple put lots of time and effort into making pixel perfect mockups “to remove all ambiguity.” And then they have the “10 to 3 to 1″ rule:

Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature. Not, Lopp said, “seven in order to make three look good”, which seems to be a fairly standard practice elsewhere. They’ll take ten, and give themselves room to design without restriction. Later they whittle that number to three, spend more months on those three and then finally end up with one strong decision.

10 entirely different mockups for any new feature? Proof that God truly is in the details.

Posted by David Zienowicz