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> Mr. Ive and his team of designers drew concepts for a car that would look like a European minivan such as the Fiat Multipla 600, which has a half-dozen window

> Mr. Ive and his team of designers drew concepts for a car that would look like a European minivan such as the Fiat Multipla 600, which has a half-dozen windows and a curving roof. It had no steering wheel and would be controlled using Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri. > One day, in the fall of 2015, Mr. Ive and Mr. Cook met at the project’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., for a demonstration of how the car might work. The two men sank into the seats of a cabinlike interior. Outside, a voice actor read from a script of what Siri would say as the men zoomed down the road in the imaginary car. Mr. Ive asked Siri what restaurant they passed and the actor read an answer, said two people familiar with the demonstration. Tackling one of the hardest technical problems ever attempted, where it was not clear at all whether a solution is even possible (it is still not clear) they seriously discussed the script Siri would read.

ripe 3y ago
I was going to say exactly the same thing. This is precisely the issue with UX-led processes. When you're dealing with very hard engineering problems, you really don't yet know enough to be designing a product. I think it's very interesting that Apple went back and forth on the purpose of the project: were they building an electric car that people could use? Or a self-driving dream car? This is a critical question. Depending on which one you want to build, the process has to be completely different, no? My outsider impression: most Apple groups excel as "productizers" of technology that has already been developed, but perhaps not as developers of technology themselves. I guess the chip making shop that produced the M1 and M2 would not be this type of group.
- culturestate 3y ago
  > This is precisely the issue with UX-led processes. When you're dealing with very hard engineering problems, you really don't yet know enough to be designing a product. I suppose we can get into the weeds on how you define "designing a product," but under the right circumstances targeting a specific experience and working backwards to the technology has pretty clear benefits. Ignoring Apple - because this kind of over-the-top process is just how they're wired - look at something like a modern automatic defibrillator. Literally any human being can use one with zero training because the goal was "make a defibrillator that someone can operate with one button" from the beginning. If your goal is instead e.g. "make this existing defibrillator easier to use," you might still end up with a really good product but you probably don't have something that my mom could reasonably be expected to deploy if she runs across someone having a heart attack on the street.
- GenerWork 3y ago
  >This is precisely the issue with UX-led processes As opposed to engineer-led processes, which as we all know are infallible and always produce products that go to market 100% of the time :) >I think it's very interesting that Apple went back and forth on the purpose of the project This is the real reason it failed. The fact that nobody at Apple could say "this is what we're aiming to do" and then stick to that vision is more telling about Apple culture than it is about any UX processes.
- simonh 3y ago
  It depends where you draw the line in the tech stack. On the hardware side they've always worked at least at the same hardware level as any workstation or PC vendor, and often arguably lower than that working with component manufacturers to custom spec particular components. They're an aggressive early adopter of new tech, putting in the work to adapt it to their product categories, sometimes directly funding tech development with partners to make that happen. They jumped on the tech for laser cutting aluminium laptop and mobile device bodies from aluminium blocks, gorilla glass for mobile devices, helped develop the specs and tech for retina and 5K displays, were actively involved in the development of open technologies like Wifi, USB, Firewire, etc. They've never been content to just buy parts off the shelf, pushing to promote the development of and get early access to new stuff other competitors didn't have. On the software side they hired the best, including about half the former staff of Xerox PARC, the developer of the MACH microkernel, the developer of LLVM. You could argue that Apple didn't invent these technologies, but people at Apple did.
- oldgradstudent 3y ago
  > I was going to say exactly the same thing. This is precisely the issue with UX-led processes. When you're dealing with very hard engineering problems, you really don't yet know enough to be designing a product. It's like the Wright brothers, before working on the Kitty Hawk, worked on mocks up of an online ticket ordering system.
itslennysfault 3y ago
Siri can't even get basic tasks right, and they want me to trust it to drive my car? ....nah.
cube00 3y ago
Bike-shedding at its finest.
kemayo 3y ago
That actually seems like a reasonable thing to do. Early-on going "assuming that we solve the technical issues with self-driving, can we make this into a product that works for us?" makes sense to me. After all, if they found that they couldn't come up with a good experience for it, then they could stop throwing all that effort into solving the hard technical problems.

ripe 3y ago

I was going to say exactly the same thing. This is precisely the issue with UX-led processes. When you're dealing with very hard engineering problems, you really don't yet know enough to be designing a product. I think it's very interesting that Apple went back and forth on the purpose of the project: were they building an electric car that people could use? Or a self-driving dream car? This is a critical question. Depending on which one you want to build, the process has to be completely different, no? My outsider impression: most Apple groups excel as "productizers" of technology that has already been developed, but perhaps not as developers of technology themselves. I guess the chip making shop that produced the M1 and M2 would not be this type of group.

culturestate 3y ago
> This is precisely the issue with UX-led processes. When you're dealing with very hard engineering problems, you really don't yet know enough to be designing a product. I suppose we can get into the weeds on how you define "designing a product," but under the right circumstances targeting a specific experience and working backwards to the technology has pretty clear benefits. Ignoring Apple - because this kind of over-the-top process is just how they're wired - look at something like a modern automatic defibrillator. Literally any human being can use one with zero training because the goal was "make a defibrillator that someone can operate with one button" from the beginning. If your goal is instead e.g. "make this existing defibrillator easier to use," you might still end up with a really good product but you probably don't have something that my mom could reasonably be expected to deploy if she runs across someone having a heart attack on the street.
GenerWork 3y ago
>This is precisely the issue with UX-led processes As opposed to engineer-led processes, which as we all know are infallible and always produce products that go to market 100% of the time :) >I think it's very interesting that Apple went back and forth on the purpose of the project This is the real reason it failed. The fact that nobody at Apple could say "this is what we're aiming to do" and then stick to that vision is more telling about Apple culture than it is about any UX processes.
simonh 3y ago
It depends where you draw the line in the tech stack. On the hardware side they've always worked at least at the same hardware level as any workstation or PC vendor, and often arguably lower than that working with component manufacturers to custom spec particular components. They're an aggressive early adopter of new tech, putting in the work to adapt it to their product categories, sometimes directly funding tech development with partners to make that happen. They jumped on the tech for laser cutting aluminium laptop and mobile device bodies from aluminium blocks, gorilla glass for mobile devices, helped develop the specs and tech for retina and 5K displays, were actively involved in the development of open technologies like Wifi, USB, Firewire, etc. They've never been content to just buy parts off the shelf, pushing to promote the development of and get early access to new stuff other competitors didn't have. On the software side they hired the best, including about half the former staff of Xerox PARC, the developer of the MACH microkernel, the developer of LLVM. You could argue that Apple didn't invent these technologies, but people at Apple did.
oldgradstudent 3y ago
> I was going to say exactly the same thing. This is precisely the issue with UX-led processes. When you're dealing with very hard engineering problems, you really don't yet know enough to be designing a product. It's like the Wright brothers, before working on the Kitty Hawk, worked on mocks up of an online ticket ordering system.

itslennysfault 3y ago

Siri can't even get basic tasks right, and they want me to trust it to drive my car? ....nah.

cube00 3y ago

Bike-shedding at its finest.

kemayo 3y ago

That actually seems like a reasonable thing to do. Early-on going "assuming that we solve the technical issues with self-driving, can we make this into a product that works for us?" makes sense to me. After all, if they found that they couldn't come up with a good experience for it, then they could stop throwing all that effort into solving the hard technical problems.