We don't want people to remember their interactions with Facebook

Facebook is playing a different design game than the rest of Silicon Valley. Instead of obsessing about making tasks like posting a photo easier or making the interface more beautiful, Facebook is getting its product out of the way. The goal, explains Cox, is to "make the experience of using Facebook as seamless and easy as talking to people in real life." That sounds like the absence of design, but the simplicity of the look and the reach of the service has attracted top designers....
"The biggest thing that's different is that Facebook is not about human-computer interaction," says Cox. Most designers in the computer industry have focused on helping humans interact with machines. But Facebook is about human-to-human interaction. "We don't want people to remember their interactions with Facebook," says director of design Kate Aronowitz. "We want them to remember their interactions with their friends and family." Cox calls this "social design"....

E. B. Boyd, "The Design of Happiness: Why design is the secret engine of the social network," Fast Company, Mar 2012,
www.fastcompany.com/magazine/164/designing-facebook.

“Can you imagine looking at that every day? It’s not just a little thing. It’s something we have to do right.”

I’ll know it when I see it. That was Jobs’s credo, and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge. He looked at the title bars—the headers that run across the top of windows and documents—that his team of software developers had designed for the original Macintosh and decided he didn’t like them. He forced the developers to do another version, and then another, about twenty iterations in all, insisting on one tiny tweak after another, and when the developers protested that they had better things to do he shouted, “Can you imagine looking at that every day? It’s not just a little thing. It’s something we have to do right.”

Malcolm Gladwell, "The Tweaker: The real genius of Steve Jobs," The New Yorker, 14 Nov 2011, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell,
via Sam Grigg.

Jony Ive on Design at Apple

Q: What makes design different at Apple?
A: We struggle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple, but it is very much about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers. If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it’s new you are confronting problems and challenges you don’t have references for. To solve and address those requires a remarkable focus. There’s a sense of being inquisitive and optimistic, and you don’t see those in combination very often.

Q: How does a new product come about at Apple?
A: What I love about the creative process, and this may sound naive, but it is this idea that one day there is no idea, and no solution, but then the next day there is an idea. I find that incredibly exciting and conceptually actually remarkable.
The nature of having ideas and creativity is incredibly inspiring. There is an idea which is solitary, fragile and tentative and doesn’t have form.
What we’ve found here is that it then becomes a conversation, although remains very fragile.
When you see the most dramatic shift is when you transition from an abstract idea to a slightly more material conversation. But when you
made a 3D model, however crude, you bring form to a nebulous idea, and everything changes - the entire process shifts. It galvanises and brings focus from a broad group of people. It’s a remarkable process.

Q: What makes a great designer?
A: It is so important to be light on your feet, inquisitive and interested in being wrong. You have that wonderful fascination with the what if questions, but you also need absolute focus and a keen insight into the context and what is important - that is really terribly important. Its about contradictions you have to navigate.

Mark Prigg, "Sir Jonathan Ive: The iMan cometh," London Evening Standard, 12 Mar 2012,
www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/sir-jonathan-ive-the-iman-cometh-7562170.html via Core 77.