“From early on we wanted something that would seem so natural and so inevitable and so simple you almost wouldn’t think of it as having been designed,” Jony explained. The shape wasn’t the issue—“it could have been shaped like a banana if we’d wanted.”
Given the parts of the device (the screen, the chip, the battery), the elements sandwiched naturally together into a box. “Sometimes things are really clear from the materials they are made from, and this was one of those times,” said Rubinstein. “It was obvious how it was going to look when it was put together.”
Jony named Richard Howarth the lead designer, and they used Fadell’s chunk of Foam Core as a reference. The big challenge was to design the user interface. Locating the screen was an issue, and so was whether or not to use buttons. The method of selecting songs was critical. The process inevitably reduced and reduced, resulting in a device with four buttons mounted on a dial.
Jobs worked on the interface with Tim Wasko, a veteran user interface (UI) designer who’d been at NeXT. Wasko was also working with Robbin on the UI for iTunes. He’d previously impressed Jobs with the metallic interface he created for QuickTime 4, which Jobs eventually adopted in most of Apple’s software, so he was given the job of figuring out the UI for the iPod.
He started by mapping out all the options a user would face when selecting a song: the artists, their albums and finally all the songs on a particular album. “When I diagrammed it out it was a series of lists connected to each other,” he said. “It was a question of pressing a button to go down to the next list, and pressing another button to come back up.”
Wasko created a demo in Adobe Director, a multimedia authoring program, that was pretty simple and straightforward. Before he showed it to Jobs, he replaced the original cursor keys from a keyboard with a USB jog wheel for editing video. The jog wheel had a central dial for scrubbing through video, and several buttons above and below it. Wasko drew paper labels for the four buttons on the bottom (play/pause, backward, forward and menu) and ignored the buttons on top. It worked great. Jobs was delighted with the system but pushed Wasko to get rid of the fourth button. Wasko should have known better. “If you give Steve one thing, he’s going to hate it, even if it’s great,” remembered Wasko. “So you have to make some other crap to put on the table.”
Wasko had brought nothing to sacrifice, and so he tried to find a way to get rid of one of the buttons. He labored for weeks but he just couldn’t find a way to navigate the hierarchy with just three buttons. “We worked our butts off on that thing,” he said.
Jobs finally acquiesced to the extra button, and Wasko took his Mac and jog wheel over to show Jony at the ID studio. “It was a quick meeting,” Wasko said. “They already knew it was going to be a wheel. I just showed Jony how the interface worked.”
Jony started experimenting with different places to put the screen and scroll wheel, but the options were limited. His team initially wanted to put four buttons above the wheel, just below the screen, but then decided to put the buttons around the scroll wheel instead. This made them easy to press with a thumb while turning the wheel.
“Steve Jobs made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content,” Jony would tell the New York Times. “It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device—which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren’t obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.”
To the consternation of a lot of users and reviewers, at least at first, an on-off button was omitted. The idea of pressing any button to turn the device on—and then to have it turn itself off after a period of inactivity—was a stroke of minimalist genius. “As such a radically new product, the iPod was inherently so compelling that it seemed appropriate for the design effort to be to simplify, remove and reduce,” Jony said.
Other standard features of portable consumer electronics disappeared too, among them the battery compartment. Most gadgets had removable batteries, meaning they need a battery door, plus an internal wall to seal the device’s guts from the user when the battery door is opened. Jony dispensed with both. A tighter, smaller product resulted, and Apple’s research had already shown that no one changed their batteries anyway, even if they said they did. The sealed battery would cause an outcry, of course, because users (and reviewers especially) had come to expect a replaceable battery as a standard feature. But dispensing with it allowed the iPod’s case to be just two pieces, comprising a stainless steel back, called the “canoe,” which snapped into an acrylic face via an internal latching mechanism. Fewer parts also meant fewer “tolerances” (gaps) in manufacturing the product (when adjacent components are supposed to be flush, the design must allow for a tolerance; with fewer parts, alignment issues diminish).
Excerpted from Page 119 of Jony Ive – The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatness by Leander Kahney