"Design like Apple"

More accurately — prioritize simplicity like Apple across all functions.

You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.

- Steve Jobs

Over the past two decades I’ve been hearing people I’ve worked with and in the product community — other designers and PMs, clients when I ran an agency, founders and CEOs — saying they want designers to “design like Apple”. The problem has always been a chicken-and-egg one: to design like Apple, you need to prioritize simplicity in all parts of your organization (like Apple).

Great designers naturally migrate towards simple

A well trained designer’s natural inclination is to design simple, elegant, and beautiful. When I see a competent designer showing work that’s overcomplicated and unfocused, usually an honest conversation will unpack that there were external pressures that steamrolled the initial intention behind the work.

Some examples of what went wrong may have included:

• Murky business goals without a strategy (ex. growth-hack our way to hit a goal)

• Unvalidated value propositions or poorly prioritized features (“we’ll include it all and see what sticks with users”)

• A lack of long-term vision paired with a feature factory culture

• A lack of a strong brand point of view, resulting in designing for too vague an audience

While a seasoned designer or design leader can identify and try their hardest to work through these challenges with teams, the headwinds are often significant.

When I worked at Microsoft early in my career, I saw this timeless fictional MSFT packaging mockup vs. Apple’s actual positioning. I still think about it.

Instead, prioritize simplicity like Apple

Ruthless prioritization is a shared job for both designer and PM, where it’s just as important to decide what not to include to get to a product as elegantly simply as Apple.

For those looking to “design like Apple”, finding a designer with a portfolio of clean, shiny UI is a trap. I am confident most designers can copy Apple’s style. There is literally a playbook for this.

Instead, look inward at the company and team, how it operates and what it values, and ask yourselves if you’re ready to make the kind of commitment across the product organization — product, engineering, design, marketing, and more — to have the discipline to keep things simple.

Then find a designer who is a thinker, who has product, customer, and business sense and has the ability to create work for the problem at hand (not just emulate visual trends or other companies). This isn’t a unicorn — this is what good design is.

Finally, design needs to be respected as a key stakeholder in what the product does and how it works — true user experience design (UX) — not just how it looks (visual design). Companies I’ve worked with that do this well have cultures where design leaders — whether a sole designer at a startup or leadership team at a larger company — are empowered to say “no” and have full support from cross-functional peers and executives to push back.

If this describes your company — or the company you’re aspiring to be — I’d love to hear from you.