Name: Guy Moorhouse's review of Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda
Item: Creative Selection
Rating: 4
Author: Guy Moorhouse

Ken Kocienda

* WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER * An insider's account of Apple's creative process during the golden years of Steve Jobs. Hundreds of millions of people use Apple products every day; several thousand work on Apple's campus in Cupertino, California; but only a handful sit at the drawing board. Creative Selection recounts the life of one of the few who worked behind the scenes, a highly-respected software engineer who worked in the final years of the Steve Jobs era—the Golden Age of Apple. Ken Kocienda offers an inside look at Apple’s creative process. For fifteen years, he was on the ground floor of the company as a specialist, directly responsible for experimenting with novel user interface concepts and writing powerful, easy-to-use software for products including the iPhone, the iPad, and the Safari web browser. His stories explain the symbiotic relationship between software and product development for those who have never dreamed of programming a computer, and reveal what it was like to work on the cutting edge of technology at one of the world's most admired companies. Kocienda shares moments of struggle and success, crisis and collaboration, illuminating each with lessons learned over his Apple career. He introduces the essential elements of innovation—inspiration, collaboration, craft, diligence, decisiveness, taste, and empathy—and uses these as a lens through which to understand productive work culture. An insider's tale of creativity and innovation at Apple, Creative Selection shows readers how a small group of people developed an evolutionary design model, and how they used this methodology to make groundbreaking and intuitive software which countless millions use every day.

Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

Creative Selection

PG Gonni

We used algorithms and heuristics like they were the left and right sides of our collective product development brain. Employing each involved an interplay of craft and taste, and we always tried to strike the correct balance. Algorithms and heuristics must coordinate to make a great high-tech product.

In this chapter about intersections, this expanded explanation fits right in. It's also highly execution dependent, as they say in Hollywood, meaning that the quality of the result is mostly in the quality of the doing. This shouldn't be surprising, given that it's a matter of people, their tools, and what they choose to do with them.

Creative selection and the seven essential elements were our most important product development ingredients, but it took committed people to breathe life into these concepts and transform them into a culture. The culture we created is inseparable from the products we created. In my experience, this manner of culture formation works best when the groups and teams remain small, when the interpersonal interactions are habitual and rich rather than occasional and fleeting.

Yes, it's true that a team at Google couldn't decide be- tween two blues, so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. […]

At Apple, we never would have dreamed of doing that, and we never staged A/B tests for any of the software on the iPhone. When it came to choosing a color, we picked one. We used our good taste—and our knowledge of how to make software accessible to people with visual difficulties related to color perception—and we moved on.

A properly judged mixture of taste and empathy is the secret formula for making products that are intuitive, easy use, and easy to live with.

Developing the judgment to avoid this pitfall centers on the refined-like response, evaluating in an active way and finding the self-confidence to form opinions with your gut you can also justify with your head. It's not always easy to come to grips with objects or ideas and think about them until it's possible to express why you like them or not, yet taking part in a healthy and productive creative process requires such reflective engagement.

We rarely had brainstorming sessions. I recall only a few times in my entire Apple career when I stood around to rough out big plans at a whiteboard... If brainstorms run longer than an hour or so, or if there are more than a handful of people in at tendance, or if they're a common occurrence, they can devolve into a form of sneaky procrastination. Whiteboard discussions feel like work, but often they’re not, since it’s too difficult to talk productively about ideas in the abstract.

We needed concrete and specific demos to guide our work, since even an unsophisticated idea is hard to discuss constructively without an artifact to illustrate it.

A significant part of attaining excellence in any field is closing the gap between the accidental and intentional, to achieve not just a something or even an everything but a specific and well-chosen thing, to take words and turn them into a vision, and then use the vision to spur the actions that create the results.

Although Linux and Mac OS X traced a common software lineage extending back to UNIX, an operating system created as a research project at Bell Laboratories in 1969, both had diverged significantly from that shared ancestor. Over time, Linux and Mac had become like two differ- ent countries separated by the same language. Linux said "lorry where the Mac said "truck." 

But do these limits always apply in software development? In the large projects Brooks was speaking about, where teams of hundreds or thousands are working against schedules and initiatives with mutual dependencies, the size of the effort bounds the speed of the work, and the overhead of communication and co-ordination swamps the impact of individuals, even the geniuses.

1. Inspiration: Thinking big ideas and imagining what might be possible

2. Collaboration: Working together well with other people and seeking to combine your complementary strengths 

3. Craft: Applying skill to achieve high-quality results and always striving to do better

4. Diligence: Doing the necessary grunt work and never resorting to shortcuts

5. Decisiveness: Making tough choices and refusing to delay or procrastinate 

6. Taste: Developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole

7. Empathy: Trying to see the world from other people's perspectives and creating work that fits into their lives and adapts to their needs

Guy Moorhouse

If you want to know what it took to build incredible products at Apple, this is the book. Ken shares so much about the process: the challenges, how he felt about it, what he (and others) did to overcome the challenges, how decisions were made... It's truly inspiring to get this scoop into the behind the scenes. 

eryc

Delightful précis of the iPhone development process and what makes Apple products great. Anecdotes about Steve, descriptions of early demos. Lots of trial and error went into making a product that felt so fully formed. Very Inside Baseball. 

Jamie Rumbelow

Creative Selection focuses on the journey of building both Safari and the iPhone keyboard with predictive text and Apple/Steve's principals that guided these to become successful pieces of software. 

It was a decent read. I don't think a lot of these principles are new if you are a follower of Apple or Steve Jobs, but really nice to hear them alongside anecdotes of coding projects. It was interesting, but for me (as someone in the space) not ground-breaking.

What I really appreciated was no coding or technical knowledge was assumed here - the computer scienc-y topics were talked through with great clarity.

James Bedford

Creative Selection focuses on the journey of building both Safari and the iPhone keyboard with predictive text and Apple/Steve's principals that guided these to become successful pieces of software. 

It was a decent read. I don't think a lot of these principles are new if you are a follower of Apple or Steve Jobs, but really nice to hear them alongside anecdotes of coding projects. It was interesting, but for me (as someone in the space) not ground-breaking.

What I really appreciated was no coding or technical knowledge was assumed here - the computer scienc-y topics were talked through with great clarity.

Josh Clement

Bought this on a whim. After reading the cover I was worried that I was in business book land. Not the case. Mainly a series of examples and stories from developing the iPhone. Insider baseball, but as a UI designer I found all the details fascinating. It’s tough write about technical mundane stuff and make it interesting and I think Ken pulls it off. This is in the weeds, but some important lessons about good product design and development.

Luke Kanies

There really isn’t anywhere else to get details on how Apple builds products, which is why it’s not ranked lower. It’s not written that well, in either narrative or writing style, but the story itself is valuable, and rarely told. 

It’s a fast read, and for those truly interested, ironically you likely won’t learn much, because most of it is either intuitive or visible from the outside.

My biggest take-away was essentially validation of demo culture. Everything else was either in support of that, or errata that some might find interesting but I did not.

Palash Karia

A very interesting read on how Apple product development functioned during the iPhone years.

Tyler Jefford

Fantastic book! Hearing how large companies build innovative products and the software blunders that came before the polished versions of apple software was very interesting. Must read for people who build software.

Michael Camilleri

Kocienda's pitch to a non-technical audience is that he'll explain to you how it is that Apple could create amazing products like the iPhone. As someone with a technical background, I'm not sure how successful he is at this goal.

What I found instead was a truly incredible collection of anecdotes that let you understand what it was like to work at a company like Apple during a period when it was creating a product that would literally change the world. Easily the best book about Apple in the Jobs 2.0 era.

Zane Shannon

James Muspratt

Nikita Pashinsky

Bill Chung

Rishaan Desai

Imran

An insider's account of Apple's creative process during the golden years of Steve Jobs. 'If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to work in a hotbed of innovation, you’ll enjoy this inside view of life at Apple. Ken Kocienda pioneered the iPhone keyboard, and this book gives a play-by-play of their creative process –from generating ideas to doing a demo for Steve Jobs.' Adam Grant Hundreds of millions of people use Apple products every day; several thousand work on Apple's campus in Cupertino, California; but only a handful sit at the drawing board. Creative Selection recounts the life of one of the few who worked behind the scenes, a highly-respected software engineer who worked in the final years of the Steve Jobs era, the Golden Age of Apple. Ken Kocienda offers an inside look at Apple’s creative process. For fifteen years, he was on the ground floor of the company as a specialist, directly responsible for experimenting with novel user interface concepts and writing powerful, easy-to-use software for products including the iPhone, the iPad and the Safari web browser. His stories explain the symbiotic relationship between software and product development for those who have never dreamed of programming a computer, and reveal what it was like to work on the cutting edge of technology at one of the world's most admired companies. Kocienda shares moments of struggle and success, crisis and collaboration, illuminating each with lessons learned over his Apple career. He introduces the essential elements of innovation, inspiration, collaboration, craft, diligence, decisiveness, taste, and empathy, and uses these as a lens through which to understand productive work culture. An insider's tale of creativity and innovation at Apple, Creative Selection shows readers how a small group of people developed an evolutionary design model, and how they used this methodology to make groundbreaking and intuitive software which countless millions use every day.

Jürgen Schweizer

Sanjay Krishna 

Matthew Jackson

Tanner Christensen

Yuval Shoshan

Todd Prauner

Rudd Zwolinski

From 2001 to 2017 Ken Kocienda was a software engineer and designer at Apple. In Creative Selection he gives his personal account of what it was like to work at Apple during the last few years of the Steve Jobs era--from demo-ing products for Steve Jobs, to helping create software for products like the iPhone, the iPad, and WebKit, the most popular software in the world for browsing the web. Throughout, Kocienda shares the principles he and his colleagues used at Apple to do their best, most innovative work and to make great products, including the demo-driven iterative creative selection method used for turning ideas into finished work. The book is an inside look at how a group of software engineers and designers made world-changing products the Apple way.Creative Selection is about making great products and Ken's experiences trying to make them. During his fifteen years at Apple, the effort to make great products was all he thought about and cared about. Software was his piece in the product puzzle. He developed user interface concepts and prototypes which made the most of new hardware features, he wrote heaps of computer code to make it all go, and he worked with other programmers and designers to create bug-free software which shipped on schedule, as they all tried to make products which would surprise and delight the people who were eagerly waiting the unveiling of the next great thing. Apple was the perfect company for Ken, and his timing was great. He got in on the ground floor of some cool projects, including: the iPhone, the iPad, the Safari web browser, and more. The book is a collection of Ken's stories and thoughts about how they made these products--the light bulbs clicking on over people's heads, the long struggles to solve seemingly insoluble problems, the pleas for help, the brilliant people, the moments of confusion, the demo reviews, the methodical work, the never-ending demands to do better, and finally, the success of making products which people everywhere use every day to express themselves through words and pictures, communicate with their loved ones, and interact with the world.

Guy Moorhouse &
Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda

Reviews

Highlights

Join the club

Guy Moorhouse &Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda

Reviews

Highlights

Join the club

Guy Moorhouse &
Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda