> Do you typically have the opportunity to spend several months working  
> on your second round of concepts before settling on one? 

Yes, and I reckon that many big companies would have at least several
weeks -- if not several months -- of design cycle on most major
projects. Of course, there are always exceptions (even Microsoft did
Zune_v1 in 11 months from scratch to shipping), but I doubt they are the
dominant case. 

In my team, when the release cycle was shortened from two years to one,
we simply started working on two releases in parallel: ideation on one
and detailed design on the other. There is no "second round"; there are
multiple concepts that get reviewed and refined and reviewed and refined
until a decision is made. HOW the final concept is selected is much more
interesting. You can't recreate success by recreating a process. There
is a little devil in the selection criteria, too -- and that is what
Apple is not going to tell us.

If you are in a design shop or a small software company, things can be
very different, I agree. But it's a different story altogether and it
would be unfair and impractical to compare work practices of small and
large companies or in-house design and consulting. 


> We've speculated about Apple's design process in the past. 
> This is the most information they've proffered.

That's a good point. It's about secrecy, not the process itself. Apple
is brilliant at their marketing strategies. Keep things secret and it
will heat up curiosity and anticipation. Of course, when a fingernail of
the precious design body is revealed, it makes a Big Bang!   

By all means, I have always been an advocate of shared knowledge and
discussions on how different teams succeed. It's just once again
slightly annoying that everything Apple does triggers that default "my
God has spoken, I am enlightened" behaviour. Look at the details of the
God's gospel; they are new because we didn't know them about Apple, not
because we didn't know the process as such. 

Lada
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