Customer Experience Lessons From Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs is stepping down as CEO of Apple. That’s a big loss for Apple. Jobs transformed Apple from a niche computer maker to one of the most influential technology/consumer product companies on earth. Under his leadership, Apple developed iPods, iPads, iTunes, iPhones, Apple Stores, etc. That’s an incredible portfolio. Thank you Steve!

We can learn a lot about customer experience and design from Steve Jobs. Rather than write a bunch of things, I decided to pull together a collection of Jobs’ quotes. There’s a lot to learn from his words:

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.

You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.

That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.

And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

The bottom line: There’s always a market for simplicity, focus, and good design

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