14 DAY TRIAL // An interview with former Apple Senior Designer and user experience Evangelist Mark Kawano debunks four myths about the company headquartered at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California, including several tales about Steve Jobs being a cruel and oppressive ruler.
Speaking to Fast Company about his experience at Apple, where he worked as senior designer and UX evangelist, Mark Kawano opens up a treasure trove of information that seems to debunk some of the biggest misconceptions regarding Steve Jobs’ company.
Asked to elaborate on the myth regarding the Cupertino giant having the best designers in the industry, Kawano felt compelled to outline that “It's actually the engineering culture, and the way the organization is structured to appreciate and support design.”
“Everybody there is thinking about UX and design, not just the designers. And that’s what makes everything about the product so much better … much more than any individual designer or design team.”
In other words, Apple hires people with an affinity for aesthetic pleasantries, regardless of their previous line of work or what they’re about to do at the company once hired.
The organization at Apple also teaches its employees that individualism ruins the company’s goal of creating the best user experience. Kawano explains:
“It’s not this thing where you get some special wings or superpowers when you enter Cupertino. It’s that you now have an organization where you can spend your time designing products, instead of having to fight for your seat at the table, or get frustrated when the better design is passed over by an engineering manager who just wants to optimize for bug fixing. All of those things are what other designers at other companies have to spend a majority of their time doing. At Apple, it’s kind of expected that experience is really important.”
On the myth regarding Apple employing massive armies of designers, he said, “I knew every one of them by face and name.” He added that the Mac maker never used more than 100 designers on any project, and that only the big ones got the full army’s attention. Nowadays, things are a bit different, though.
“For Apple, having a small, really focused organization made a lot of sense when Steve was there, because so many ideas came from Steve. So having a smaller group work on some of these ideas made sense. As Apple shifted to much more of a company where there’s multiple people at the top, I think it makes sense that they’re growing the design team in interesting ways.”
Apple also doesn’t want people keeping to themselves, no matter what the project is or how unimportant it may seem.
“There wasn’t a formalized library, because most of the time there wasn't that much that was formalized of anything that could be stolen,” Kawano said. “It was more having a small team and knowing what people had worked on, and the culture of being comfortable sharing.”
The ex UX senior recalls people working on interface elements that only became suited for implementation years later. Apple took those elements at the time of their birth, shelved them, and then used them when they made sense.
As for Steve Jobs being a tyrant, Kawano wouldn’t deny the rumor, but he noted that Jobs had his circumstances. Basically anyone who didn’t give 110 percent had no place at the company, and he would let the lazier staffer know he wasn’t welcome there.
“That’s where, a lot of times, he would get a bad rap, but he just wanted the best thing, and expected everyone else to want that same thing. He had trouble understanding people who didn’t want that same thing and wondered why they’d be working for him if that was the case. I think Steve had a very low tolerance for people who didn’t care about stuff. He had a very hard time understanding why people would work in these positions and not want to sacrifice everything for them.”