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What I Learned as a Product Designer at Apple

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By Andrea Pacheco

In 2021 I landed my dream job. Working at Apple, the holy grail of minimalistic design, innovation, and creativity. A place where misfits have a seat on the table and where bold, crazy ideas are highly encouraged. As a Product Designer, working at Apple was a life-changing experience, and all I can say is that I’ll keep carrying some of its principles with me wherever I go. In the one year that I worked at Apple, here are the top 10 lessons I learned:

TL;DR

  • Apple is a unique company and I believe that the way they do product design can only be successful due to their business model, which allows for innovation, failure, risks, and a strong focus on design craft excellence, even if it takes a long time to get there.
  • Build a great product, not an MVP.
  • Storytelling is the best skill we need to develop as product designers.
  • A top-down culture is not as bad as we think.

Disclaimer: The opinions presented here are all based on my experience and don’t necessarily reflect how Apple operates.

Great design will take you far, great communication will take you even further: influence people and move things forward.

Projects get built when enough people believe in them. From small talks to elaborating decisions to VP presentations. The way we speak, project ourselves, and elaborate our thoughts is fundamental for getting consensus, influencing people, and moving things forward.

My biggest learning was to put passion into my speech. Not only when presenting work, but especially when talking in meetings. Be truly excited about your work and show this excitement to everyone working around you.

Jobs had an amazing ability to make his ideas understandable and memorable because he spoke with passion. People may not remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel: confident, interested, optimistic, bored, reluctant, etc.

At the end of the day, we’re not only selling products to customers externally, but also selling our ideas to teams and stakeholders internally, and the key to any successful sale is communication.

Storytelling is your superpower: are we deck designers after all?

One of the things that surprised me the most was to see that for any piece of work being shared, designers would put together a keynote deck for it. It could be the smallest thing, like a quick look at the latest work progression, or big presentations, of course. At Apple, designers use the power of storytelling to influence others, instead of just showing what they are doing.

A few tips I learned when presenting work on decks are:

  • Tell a story instead of explaining the process.
  • Only focus on one idea per slide. Don’t confuse what you’re saying by having busy slides. Use one bold sentence per slide. Instead of paragraphs of text.
  • Use presenter notes as a script for your speech. Let the image/mockups paint the picture of what you’re saying in the background.
  • Rehearse your presentations. Even if it’s just a small design critique for a few designers, take one hour or less before the meeting to go through your narrative and know exactly what you need to say to get straight to the point.
  • Have fun! It goes back to how you want people to feel and how helping people feel optimistic during your presentation will help you gain their trust and move things forward (even if the work needs some iteration).

Big ideas are more important than usability fixes: the art of balancing long-term vs. short-term goals.

One thing I noticed is that most of the product teams won’t spend their bandwidth working on small wins and fixes. Instead, teams are focused on long-term impact and building the next big thing. This might explain why every year we see at WWDC Apple releasing a new great feature that will blow our minds, but that small minor usability issue is still there.

It comes down to the company culture. Apple is known for being an innovative brand, so there’s a natural expectation that the company will be working towards releasing innovative products and experiences and this affects how the company prioritizes its efforts.

So I guess the learning is if you want to be innovative, focus on the big wins instead of the small ones. Even if it takes more time to get there.

Trust your instinct, you’re an expert: in making decisions without user testing.

In the ideal world, whenever we’re designing, we user test to spot any red flags on usability or accessibility.

At Apple, you can’t just go out there and use usertesting.com to test your new designs. Imagine if word gets on the street and everyone knows what exciting new feature Apple is working on. You need to find new ways to test your designs, without compromising their secrecy of it.

One of the ways to do that is by running internal user tests with selected employees. Another way is to rely on expert reviews. Expert reviews are design critiques with highly knowledgeable people, usually design directors, VP of products, and managers. The stakes are high and you have to elaborate on the intentionality behind every single design choice. You might think this is a biased way of making decisions, but I’ve found those sessions way more valuable than any user testing I’ve been in. The amount of detail that gets challenged is unbelievable and you can see that the brightest people are looking after the user experience so these products are easy and simple to use.

Being a highly-output generator over a strategic thinker.

People say that Apple is a dream company for any designer and I believe most of it is since as a designer at Apple, you focus most of your time on one thing: the craft. The execution. How the product will behave (interaction design), look (visual design), and make people feel and scale on the ecosystem (system design).

And to have time to focus on craft and execution — and master the details — there’s an amazing smart product team (PMs, PMMs, etc) that will focus on product thinking and strategy.

I do have to say that I missed being more involved in product decisions. I was in charge of interaction and system design decisions, but I often missed having a seat at the table to think through the product strategy.

“One more thing”: going beyond the problem you’re solving.

You probably remember the One More Thing practice initiated by Steve. Well, that applies to the work inside Apple as well. This is not a mandatory thing, but I saw it quite a lot, and to be honest, I loved it.

It’s the bonus culture. As I said, everything is a presentation and all presentations are on the keynote. Bonus is a deck section that will go last on your presentation and it shows how you went above and beyond to explore other opportunities related to your project, some stretch goal, or new ways of winning.

In summary, it’s a chance to push the team to think bigger and look at other opportunities that are not being considered (or can’t at the moment). What I love about this culture is it gives designers a safe space to share their creative ideas while getting visibility from stakeholders, without the pressure and judgment of “having” to build it. If it gets buy-in, great, if not, it’s always good to have food for thought!

Simplicity is hard. Very hard. But when you get it, it’s beautiful.

Build a great product, not an MVP: maintaining a reputation of excellence.

When you buy an Apple product you don’t expect it to be in a testing phase. You expect a product of its highest quality and performance. This hardware development culture is also reflected in the software and service development culture at Apple.

I’ll never forget this one time when I was at a meeting with a product team from Apple TV, and someone said that we could do a release on the web and mobile platform, but we didn’t have the experience ready for TV. So the PM said “If we can’t launch the best experience across all our platforms now, we’re not launching it at all. If we need to wait another year to deliver the best experience for our customers, we’ll wait.”

I even got the chills! Never in my entire career have I heard a PM saying that we would delay the release to launch the best experience that people deserve to get.

I guess this story says a lot about the culture of excellence at Apple. Lots of people complain about how Apple takes a long time to launch features or products that the competition already has, but I truly believe this is due to the culture of just launching a product when we think it will be an amazing experience for people. And I know that this software development culture is only possible at Apple since the company is in a unique position of having a business model that allows for that.

Learn to say “no”.

This is one of the best things I’ve learned in my career. Learning to say no it’s all about learning how to prioritize impact. There’s only so much our brain can take and we can get done in a week. It’s important to put your energy into projects, meetings, and activities that will bring the most impact. And because at big tech companies, there are always exciting projects and opportunities all around, it’s quite easy to get involved in everything at once. But the best way to leave your mark is to deliver in great quality, what you promised. So, don’t eat more than what you can take.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.” Steve Jobs

A top-down culture is not as bad as we think.

Last but not least, one of the most distinctive traits of Apple is the top-down company. This means there’s a culture of presenting work to Directors, Managers, etc and getting their approval to move forward.

Every time I had a director or design lead disagreeing with my point of view, they were damn right. And that’s because, at Apple, there’s not much ego involved. I found that people are truly looking for the best user experience possible. So if someone disagrees with your point of view, they probably have a pretty good reason for that. There’s a safe space for a healthy debate and again, all-around intentionality.

The reason why I loved the top-down culture at Apple is that important decisions are taken faster. Having an expert give you the green light or not keeps the momentum. How many times in a bottom-up culture, do we spend weeks and weeks, sometimes even months, trying to get alignment with +10 people, because every single person needs to agree with the point of view? It is exhausting.

So again, my experience is that having that one leader to look up to help guide decisions is time-saving, it helps us focus on the design craft, instead of project managing.

By Andrea Pacheco

Sourced from UX Magazine

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Connecting the Dots Between Product and Branding

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By Douglas Montague

How rethinking brand expression influenced Microsoft products and vice versa

Imagine a sheet of paper with a couple dozen tiny dots spread out on it. Their placement doesn’t seem random. You can sort of make out a shape, but there’s no obvious way they go together.

Now imagine a sheet with identical tiny dots, only each one is numbered. The dots may still look like a jumble, but the numbers indicate how they link together. You draw a line from one to two, two to three, and so on. Oh look, you’ve drawn a seal balancing a beach ball on its nose! Gold star.

Working for a big company sometimes feels like staring at thousands of dots and having little idea how to connect them. I’ve been with Microsoft since 1995, but I don’t think I understood how these dots could work together until 2015.

That’s when we changed our marketing strategy. Before, the product design team would build and design the experiences, and the marketing team layered a brand identity on top to sell it. With the 2015 change, branding was no longer a “layer” of marketing disconnected from the product experience. Instead, branding became directly tied to and influenced by the product. And maybe, just maybe, the brand could influence the product in return.

In the heavily siloed world of giant corporations, that was practically crazy talk.

One dot at a time

Simplicity became our mission. We first needed to build brand principles and the brand story (in other words, why we exist in the world). Then, we’d figure out how the principles and story inform the product experience. We theorized that connecting experience and expression among product, brand identity, and marketing, and extrapolating those principles into meaningful guidance across the company, would create a better experience for customers.

Numbers started to appear next to those scattered dots staring me in the face. The trick was getting other people to see them, too.

To show people the value of brand creative teams in marketing, we needed to have a lot more conversations with product design. First, we needed to understand what they were building and where they were headed. Second, we needed to create a visual identity closely tied to the product’s visual language, which a worldwide marketing organization could later implement.

Easy enough, right?

Thankfully, our senior leadership encourages us to work together for the greater good of the company, pushing away our own egos as much as possible to bring success to all. We call this One Microsoft. Particularly in our area, acting as One Microsoft is a necessity: we have a tiny creative team and can’t succeed without the assistance of other great creatives, so we need to understand each other’s business and create together. When it works, it’s magical.

Case study: transforming Microsoft Office

Rebranding Office was one such magical example. For the first time, we looked to product teams for cues to lift the brand identity and create simple, scalable guidance. We worked directly with product design, an approach that we’d take later with Azure and HoloLens 2.

Our approach had five steps:

  1. Create the brand story working across brand strategy, engineering, and marketing, including a deep dive into product design principles and future principles.
  2. Conduct an end-to-end visual audit of the entire customer journey.
  3. Identify visual patterns and cues from the product, and from the parent Microsoft brand, to create a visual identity for the brand expression.
  4. Build creative principles and theories around color, illustration, typography, and photography, then stress test across all communication touchpoints in the marketing funnel.
  5. Create a simple design system that designers could scale worldwide without much creative oversight.
Three large black boards with print outs of the current Office branding.

Three large black boards with print outs of the current Office branding.

Boards from one of the many visual audits done in 2016 for Microsoft Office.

Our audit concluded that Office needed a more sophisticated yet simplified visual identity connecting our product experience and marketing communications. The marketing teams were doing their best; they followed the Microsoft brand guide for reference, but the broadness of the guide and visual system made it difficult to implement. We pared down the brand system in the name of simplicity.

Office brand guideline examples including personality, colors, and font.

Office brand guideline examples including personality, colors, and font.

Pages from the Microsoft Office Brand Guidelines.

Our collaboration effectively linked the pre-purchase marketing communications to the post-purchase ones. For example, we used our marketing expertise at engaging users to improve the first-usage experience (for example, the “how to” videos that introduced users to Office online). In that space, the product team focused more on UX, not the kind of branded moments within the product where you can tell a story.

The fifth step in that process was perhaps the toughest, simply because of scale. Several hundred marketers worked on Office, each with their own budget, each choosing their own creative. Because of that, and their concern that we’d just scold them for doing things wrong, none of their work went through a creative review process. We not only had to change how people worked, but we also had to assure them we had their best interests in mind.

In time, people from other teams understood that we weren’t focused solely on creative, that we wanted to help them meet their business objectives and performance metrics. Again, it comes back to that One Microsoft principle of trusting each other and helping each other succeed. Product teams started seeking out our involvement, and marketing trusted us to make more things on their behalf.

Keeping a good thing going

We emulated this turning point elsewhere. We worked directly with principal designers Paul Cooper and Lance Garcia to build creative principles (for everyone keeping track, that’s step 4) that ended up changing the patterns and UX of . Functionality informed brand choices, which reflected back on the site itself.

The front page of the Azure.com website.

The front page of the Azure.com website.

Azure.com

The same goes for HoloLens 2, which was perhaps our most daunting task. The product team had worked on it for two years by the time we stepped in to begin branding, so we had catching up to do. (Yes, not ideal.)

HoloLens 2 works in mixed reality, a new medium for most users. Because of that, people need more than product photography or UI to understand how it works. So, I partnered closely John Nguyen and David Wolf from the product design team to come up with a solution. We were inspired by prismatic light in holograms and by the way the product sensors understand the world and generate a 3D map. We believed that this prism and map would tie the marketing and the product experience together in a beautiful way. The product experience largely informed the elegant brand we created for HoloLens 2 and subsequent marketing materials.

Four expressions of the HoloLens branding.

Four expressions of the HoloLens branding.

HoloLens 2 Prismatic Color Blend used in illustration, full-bleed backgrounds, and HoleLens 2 wordmark logo.

These marketing materials turned out well — so well that they influenced the product. Romiro Torres, the creative director for HoloLens 2 UX, was working out the visual expression and experience of how the device maps a room. He integrated the same visualization into the product experience, so users see the same visualization we created for marketing when HoloLens 2 maps the room they’re standing in.

HoloLens 2 Room Mapping from the launch announcement in Barcelona

Chances are that doesn’t sound like a big deal to you, but it felt huge — that “maybe, just maybe” moment I mentioned earlier. If you listen closely, you can hear silo walls cracking.

Those are the kinds of moments we strive to create every day. They become a lot more likely when teams spend the time to truly understand each other. Branding makes that easier. It provides that layer of customer clarity, connecting the dots so that marketing and product can take a step back, look at the lines, and say, “Wow, a seal balancing a beach ball!”

By Douglas Montague

Microsoft Brand Creative Director. I don’t believe creative that has commercial success tags it with an odious suggestion that is stinks. Views are my own.

Sourced from Medium

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The road to UX is not always straight

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By Kristin Sinko-Smith

About a year ago, I made the transition from marketing to UX. I studied psychology and marketing in school and launched into a marketing career after graduating. I enjoyed what I was doing, but I wasn’t sure it was the right career path for me. By lucky happenstance, I discovered user experience and immediately fell in love.

Although we use metrics and other bits of data in marketing to influence people, I often felt like I was playing a guessing game. Would this LinkedIn campaign perform well? Would this particular email resonate? I felt like my target audience was behind some sort of wall. I could occasionally glean something from past successes or recommended approaches, but I didn’t truly understand them. The idea of pursuing a career that was focused on the users and integrating their needs into a product was very intriguing.

But it was not an easy transition. From the time I discovered UX to finally landing my first role, it took about two and a half years. There were highs and lows, from completing different courses to almost giving up on the job search.

That’s right — I almost gave up. User experience can be a really tough field to break into. Which was especially disheartening because I kept hearing about how much the field was growing and the gap in talent to match that growth. After completing initial research on my own and completing a UX class with General Assembly, I eagerly scoured job boards to see what was available.

But I found two huge issues. The first was the quality of job postings. As I mentioned, and as you probably know, UX is a growing field. And while that means lots of opportunities, it also means companies may not totally understand what they are hiring for. The number of postings I saw that included everything from UI, to UX design, to UX research, to front-end development was terrifying. Sure, there are people that will have skills across the board, but it’s a very rare person who can do it all well.

Another issue was experience. A lot of companies just weren’t willing to take on a junior person. They wanted someone who could jump right in and hit the ground running.

I despaired for a bit, but then I changed my way of thinking and decided to take a slightly different route. At the time, I was working for a small non-profit. It was a great place to begin my career, but I started looking at marketing roles within larger companies that also had UX teams. I thought perhaps I could transition to UX once I proved myself.

So, I landed a job at a much larger company. Shortly after starting, however, my company was acquired and there were a lot of changes to manage. I felt myself pulling away from UX again in order to stay afloat. I lost my way for a bit.

After everything started to settle down (slightly), I felt myself drawn back towards it and I reached out to the UX team within my company. I was able to work on a mini research project, which invigorated me to pick my pursuit back up. I started attending local meetups again and also registered for the Nielsen Norman conference to attain a certification in UX Research.

At this point, I had been studying UX for over two years. There were times I felt like I might never make it and times where I had to solely focus on my marketing career. But even when I shoved it to the back of my mind, I never completely threw the idea away. As luck would have it, I met someone at the NNg conference who recommended me to her company’s hiring team. Her company was just starting to grow a user centered design team and they were more open to junior employees. They cared more about my desire to learn and passion for the field, instead of years of experience.

Everyone takes a different route or turn on their way to UX, but that doesn’t mean it won’t ever happen. Even if you lose the way for a bit, it’s possible to re-orient yourself and find the way there. Keep learning and meeting new people. There will be companies and job postings that aren’t right for you, but that doesn’t mean the job for you doesn’t exist. If or when you lose hope, keep walking.

By Kristin Sinko-Smith

Sourced from UX Collective

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