already be stretched by the bustle of their everyday lives.

Note how Scott introduced my demo with just enough words to communicate to Steve what was next on the agenda, where he should turn his attention, and who I was. I, in turn, used the minimum number of words necessary to direct Steve’s attention further, so he knew exactly what to look at. After that, Steve looked carefully at the software and asked

Demos like this were the foundation of the Apple software development process, as you’ll see in the case of this iPad demo and as I’ll describe in many other demos throughout this book.

Consider a mom who was busy with her daily routine, on a day she was worried about her sixteen-year-old son, who was home sick from high school and was taking care of himself. She was running a few minutes late getting to the office because there was bad traffic on the road, she had a report due later in the afternoon, and she was trying to fit in

In our final design, we made punctuation and numbers available under a separate layout accessible by tapping a .?123 key. We worried there would be howls and complaints about the inconvenience of this arrangement, but it turned out to be one of those things that people adapted to readily and accepted without much fuss.

As we did all this mixing and combining of our seven essential elements, we always added in a personal touch, a little piece of ourselves, an octessence, and by putting together our goals and ideas and efforts and elements and molecules and personal touches, we formed our approach, an approach I call creative selection.

That explanation is too simple.

as part of a 2003 New York Times interview discussing the iPod, Steve drove his point home: Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it [a product] looks like. People think it’s this veneer—that the designers are handed this box and told, “Make it look good!” That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and fe

Greg often provided the insight that some difficult development path was the best way to make our products easier to use.