Fast Company Interviews One of the Original Apple Watch Designers
In an interesting long read over on Fast Company, one of the designers of the Apple Watch speaks about the lessons he learned in his years at Apple. Bob Messerschmidt began working at Apple when they bought his startup company in 2010. He worked at Apple for the next three years, and his team was responsible for creating the heart rate sensors on the Apple Watch.
The biggest takeaway I found in the article is that “delight” trumps “cutting edge.” In other words, Apple hasn’t gotten to its position in the tech world by releasing the most cutting edge technology. Rather, Apple has become the giant that it is by making products that are delightful to use. Says Messerschmidt,
“At Apple I learned that design and user experience is everything when it comes to consumer products. It’s not so much the technology. It’s the design of the product that creates that sense of happiness in the user.
If you look at products like the iPhone or the iPad there aren’t too many totally new technologies included in those products. The real elegance and differentiation doesn’t have a lot to do with the technology idea itself; it’s about the packaging and the value add it gives to people. Those big (new technology) ideas generally happen elsewhere, and they happen earlier.”
He also tells a story about the collaboration Industrial Design team as he worked on the Apple Watch’s heart rate sensors which I think illustrates the way Apple works.
“One great example is [when] I went to a meeting and said I’m going to put sensors in the watch but I’m going to put them down here (he points to the underside of the Apple Watch band he’s wearing) because I can get a more accurate reading on the bottom of the wrist than I can get on the top of the wrist. They (the Industrial Design group) said very quickly that “that’s not the design trend; that’s not the fashion trend. We want to have interchangeable bands so we don’t want to have any sensors in the band.”
Then at the next meeting I would go “we can do it here (on top of the wrist) but it’s going to have to be kind of a tight band because we want really good contact between the sensors and the skin.” The answer from the design studio would be “No, that’s not how people wear watches; they wear them like really floppy on their wrist.” That creates a set of requirements that drives you toward new engineering solutions.
That’s kind of what we had to do. We had to listen to them. They are the voice of the user. There’s the whole field of Industrial Design that focuses on the use case, the user experience.”
You can read the entire article here.
