Why We Buy

Sometimes a Designer Has to Think inside the Box

The primary purpose of the handle, of course, is to make the product easy to move, which is what we knew people would want. But it also suggests something else: When you can move something, you dominate it. Making it easy to move helps people feel less intimidated by the object or by the technology, which many, many people are.

In fact, one of our goals for designing the packaging was to have the handle be one of the first things you see when you open the box. The idea is that the first piece of packing foam you pull out becomes a little table for the manual, the keyboard, and the accessories. After you remove that piece of foam, you see the handle. You know what to do next. That's the great thing about handles: You know what they're there for.

Once you take the iMac out of its packaging, you can put the accessory box on the little table. You open that, and it's clear what to do next. One cable is for power, one is for Internet access, and one connects the keyboard.

It sounds simple and obvious. But often, getting to that level of simplicity requires enormous iteration in design. You have to spend considerable energy understanding the problems that exist and the issues people have -- even when they find it difficult to articulate those issues and problems themselves.

So when you ask why the iMac has been such a success, the answer is, the design combined with the Macintosh interface. It's just how easy the product is to take out of the box, set up, and use. That simplicity is about removing the obstacles that have made so many people intimidated by the technology in the past.

Before It Persuades Customers, a New Product Has to Persuade Its Own Company

What drove the design of the iMac was a vision and a commitment to create the best consumer computer that we could. In other words, we made the needs of the customer our highest priority. And when you do that, it places significant demands on different parts of the company.

For example, we found that the right place for a lot of the cable connectors was on the side of the iMac, which is where they are more accessible. You don't have to get up and go around to the back or move the entire machine to get to them. That was an example of trying to address issues of utility and function.

But from an engineering perspective, the easiest place to put connectors is on the back. Putting them on the side was actually very difficult and would mean elevating the concerns of the user way above those of the engineers. That drove having an easy-to-adjust keyboard and also the flip-out foot. It's sort of intuitive.

Another example: We knew people wanted a choice of colors. But if we offered people one color, we knew the next question would be, When can we have other colors? That poses a number of significant challenges for manufacturing, distribution, and managing inventory -- especially if you have demands for a certain color. Color options have never been offered in our industry.

In that sense, I think the iMac reflects the original mission: to create a great consumer product. More broadly than that, it stands as a testament to a company that not only shared the same vision but could also implement that vision. Somebody asked me how we'd convinced the people at Apple that what we were proposing with the iMac and the iBook was the right thing.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that we'd spent zero energy trying to cajole the people at Apple into believing that what we were proposing was right. We'd put all of our energy into coming up with the content and into creating just the right design. We'd been incredibly self-critical. And as a result, it took us many iterations to get to the right solution -- the one that we ultimately wanted to develop and to market.

But, by genuinely trying to design a product for people in a very natural way, people were intrigued by the product -- whether they were our managers or our customers.

What You Can't Measure Is Often What Matters Most

The computer industry is immature; it has been preoccupied with technology and driven by technologists. In some senses, the value proposition for consumers has degenerated into an argument that "Five is a greater number than two." Go back a year, and the value proposition was, "Our machine has a larger hard drive than yours," or "Our machine is cheaper than yours."

There was an obsession with product attributes that you could measure with numbers. And that's an easy value proposition to articulate: Five is a bigger number than two. It's much more difficult to articulate the value of product attributes that are less tangible. I think it's at the heart of Apple, in the genes of the company, that these other attributes do matter.