Former Apple Design Evangelist dispels several common Apple myths

Mark Kwano spent seven years at Apple, working on Aperture, iPhoto and eventually serving as Apple’s User Experience Evangelist, a position which allowed him to work with iOS developers to create software for Apple’s platform. Kwano recently talked with Fast Company about his time Apple, dispelling 4 myths about Apple’s design team.
According to Kwano, Apple’s strong design chops doesn’t come from hiring the best designers. Apple is good at design because the focus on this aspect of the user experience permeates all parts of the company.

“It’s actually the engineering culture, and the way the organization is structured to appreciate and support design. Everybody there is thinking about UX and design, not just the designers. And that’s what makes everything about the product so much better . . . much more than any individual designer or design team.”

And this team isn’t as big as you may thing, claims Kwano. Google may have a 1,000 designers and Facebook may employ a few hundred. Apple, though, runs a lean team of about a 100 people.

“For Apple, having a small, really focused organization made a lot of sense when Steve was there, because so many ideas came from Steve. So having a smaller group work on some of these ideas made sense,” Kawano says. “As Apple shifted to much more of a company where there’s multiple people at the top, I think it makes sense that they’re growing the design team in interesting ways.”

Much of the team’s inspired moments happen during their down time, when they don’t have a deadline and have time to experiment. That’s how those little nuances that make iOS and OS X are developed.

“People are constantly experimenting with these little items, and because the teams all kind of know what other people have done, once a feature comes up–say we need a good way to give feedback for a password, and we don’t want to throw up this ugly dialog–then it’s about grabbing these interaction or animation concepts that have just been kind of built for fun experiments and seeing if there’s anything there, and then applying the right ones.”

Kwano also claims Steve Jobs was not the ogre that the media often paints him to be. Jobs “would get a bad rap” when all he wanted was “he best thing, and expected everyone else to want that same thing.” He couldn’t understand people who were working for him and didn’t share his passion to “create the best product for the customer and then sacrificing everything personally to get there.” Jobs also was very much a normal person who wanted to be treated like everyone else.

“He was just super accessible. I totally tried to get him to cut in front of me, but he’d never want do anything like that. That was interesting too, he was super demanding . . . but when it came to other things, he wanted to be very democratic, and to be treated like everyone else. And he was constantly struggling with those roles.”

Kwano has left Apple and now is the founder of Storehouse, an iPad app that allows users to create visually driven stories with minimal effort.

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