\u201cFrom early on we wanted something that would seem so natural and so inevitable and so simple you almost wouldn\u2019t think of it as having been designed,\u201d Jony explained. The shape wasn\u2019t the issue\u2014\u201cit could have been shaped like a banana if we\u2019d wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Given the parts of the device (the screen, the chip, the battery), the elements sandwiched naturally together into a box. \u201cSometimes things are really clear from the materials they are made from, and this was one of those times,\u201d said Rubinstein. \u201cIt was obvious how it was going to look when it was put together.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jony named Richard Howarth the lead designer, and they used Fadell\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jobs worked on the interface with Tim Wasko, a veteran user interface (UI) designer who\u2019d been at NeXT. Wasko was also working with Robbin on the UI for iTunes. He\u2019d previously impressed Jobs with the metallic interface he created for QuickTime 4, which Jobs eventually adopted in most of Apple\u2019s software, so he was given the job of figuring out the UI for the iPod.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. \u201cWhen I diagrammed it out it was a series of lists connected to each other,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a question of pressing a button to go down to the next list, and pressing another button to come back up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. \u201cIf you give Steve one thing, he\u2019s going to hate it, even if it\u2019s great,\u201d remembered Wasko. \u201cSo you have to make some other crap to put on the table.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t find a way to navigate the hierarchy with just three buttons. \u201cWe worked our butts off on that thing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jobs finally acquiesced to the extra button, and Wasko took his Mac and jog wheel over to show Jony at the ID studio. \u201cIt was a quick meeting,\u201d Wasko said. \u201cThey already knew it was going to be a wheel. I just showed Jony how the interface worked.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSteve Jobs made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content,\u201d Jony would tell the New York Times<\/em>. \u201cIt was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device\u2014which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren\u2019t obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014and then to have it turn itself off after a period of inactivity\u2014was a stroke of minimalist genius. \u201cAs 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,\u201d Jony said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s guts from the user when the battery door is opened. Jony dispensed with both. A tighter, smaller product resulted, and Apple\u2019s 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\u2019s case to be just two pieces, comprising a stainless steel back, called the \u201ccanoe,\u201d which snapped into an acrylic face via an internal latching mechanism. Fewer parts also meant fewer \u201ctolerances\u201d (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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n