as a google engineer, i find we're not incentivized to fix small UI polish bugs... there's just no impact and no appreciation for this kind of work. we might do it once a year during a "fix it" week. so, I'm wondering how does Apple ensure their software looks perfect each release? do they reward UI polish tasks somehow?
Because Apple is a design company not a tech company! This is actually what they are good at!
I’d phrase this differently: Apple is a product first company, not a technology first company. At the end of the day, Apple wants to create products that are delightful to use. To do this, they employ (and often invent) whatever technology they need to (full stack in the most literal sense - materials research for watch bands, chip design, radio technologies, software and systems, AI, audio engineering, etc.). If you remind yourself over and over that the focus is product and the means are secondary, you’ll end up with polished products. A downside of this approach is that research (in the academic sense) sometimes is not valued as much it should be and this can and has hurt products (e.g. Siri vs. G Assistant).
The above is pretty much right- Apple tries very hard for surprise and delight ; it’s a large reason for why they feel they have a fanatical user base. Having un polished ui goes against that very thesis jobs worked hard to instill. I can give you quite a few tales about teams working long nights before a major release just to get the right shade of color or overhaul the ui to make it just right.
Would love to hear some of those tales
I would like to tell them too , but I like my job and I don’t know want to get in trouble..
I'm amazed at how bad Amazon is at UI, given we are supposed to be customer obsessed. We more or less define customer impact to mean fatal, failed transaction, or missed SLA. Unless there's a metric on a dashboard showing it's going wrong, it won't get fixed. (At least not until somebody emails Jeff and a ? goes out.) Nobody ever really thinks "wow that's awkward and confusing" to be impact. When launching something new we will get lots of customer feedback, and it will make the release very useful, but usually in a clunky and ugly way. Not much "polish". I think only Apple does polish among FAANG.
Amazon is a retail company, Apple is a fashion company, their definition of customer and good are very different
Haha - iPhone and Mac were fashion accessories no doubt and the A11 too I suppose.
The simple answer is to have your Designer be a launch checkpoint. Have them review builds amd don't launch unless they give signoff within reason. That won't help your career but sometimes put your end users ahead of your career. That's why it's called User Experience
Yep
It’s fundamentally about incentive. Vast majority of companies promote based on “impact”, and no matter how you slice and cut it, big fixing, including ui and ux bug fixing, are not as impactful as big shipments of new features. People of course act accordingly. You just can’t expect some mediocrely paid (by valley standards) engineers to give a rat’s ass about user experience at the expense of his/her family financial well-being.
It’s not about reward. It’s about what’s right for the user.
Mostly, leaders at Apple are extremely adept at saying “no”. It’s almost an art form. The Inuit people are mythologized to have 100 words for “snow”...Apple leadership have pretty close to 100 words for “no”.
Yep. Totally. I’ve heard them all, too.
But you're still not a true Appler yet because you started your reply with "yep"!
Thanks for your insightful answer. I’m so accustomed to reading inflammatory tripe here.
thanks for answering... then how are engineers evaluated? if someone spends all their time fixing small padding/layout issues, can they get promoted?