/ Blog / / Blog /Due to Apple’s secrecy, rumors and conjecture reign supreme in online discussions about Apple. Apart from the people who work directly on the products we use, no one else really knows for sure how they’re made. Sometimes we’re told stories, but some of those stories I would classify as propaganda.
Consider times Apple has pulled back the metaphorical curtain to reveal its inner workings. Those small glimpses are often just as polished as their products. Images they release and videos they produce are subject to their own standards, and tell only the story they want to tell. Plus, Apple presents themselves in a way that sells you on more than their products.
You may have seen this video from WWDC 2013. In it, Apple explains their ethos. “The first thing we ask is, ‘What do we want people to feel?’” It peaks at, “Then we begin to craft around our intention.” It tells you exactly what they value most. “There are a thousand no’s [sic] for every yes.” This phrase implies that Apple rejects tons of ideas in favor of the best one. “Only then do we sign our work. Designed by Apple in California.”
Apple sells the idea that intention is a measure of quality.
When Apple ships something that seems off, people notice. Some will earmark the flaw as the moment it all started falling apart. “Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.” Others will develop their own rationale to insist the error isn’t really an error, but rather Apple’s intention. “It’s not misaligned, it’s optically adjusted.”
But there are so many other reasons why a UI element might be misaligned.
Could the asset have been delivered with unequal margins? Can the spacing have been defined incorrectly? Did the engineer input the wrong values? Was the container reused from an element where nested elements on either side needed different spacing from the edge? Could a small, hanging icon have shifted the element from the center?
Any of these could be true, but you’d have to believe Apple is capable of making mistakes. If you don’t, you will ignore all those—and any other—possibilities, jump right to it being intentional, and try to explain why it makes sense to misalign it, like “It’s an optical adjustment.” That sounds both smart and plausible.
The problem (or advantage, depending on how you look at it) with saying something is “optical adjusted” is that you can say that whenever something is misaligned.
Even if an element was intentionally misaligned for the purposes of being optically adjusted, how is it that people noticed it so quickly and easily? How are they incapable of unseeing it? Why would someone draw a guideline if not to double-check their gut? Isn’t the whole purpose of optical adjustment to correct for something that doesn’t look right even when it is aligned perfectly?
Could things like this be both designed intentionally and implemented as intended? Sure. Could the implementation not reflect the intention? Of course. Could the design be intentional but still not quite right? Absolutely.
Now that we’ve cracked open the door to other reasons being possible, we can stop ascribing a single reason as the definitive one.
People want there to be a reason for every detail, because Apple has trained people to think there is a reason for every detail. After reading along with scripted remarks in a calmly animated video, people will assume everything at Apple has intention. And intention is what makes it good enough for them to sign their name, “Designed by Apple in California.” Even a decade later, that sentiment sticks. Because they reinforce it with the way they present and advertise.
Before I proceed, here’s my disclaimer: I only worked at Apple for about a year and a half, over ten years ago, so I have limited knowledge about how Apple is run today. I only know what I saw and experienced then, firsthand.
My secret that I’ll share with you as someone who worked there, who designed details that were under public scrutiny, is this: Sometimes the reason is just because I felt like it.
Of course there were times when the team met to discuss and decide things together, or times when Steve Jobs was the only critic. But believe it or not, there were tons of times where I was the only decision-maker. That may seem totally wild in the current era, where companies A/B test everything, but a lot of what I did then—and do today—is based on pure feeling. And I don’t doubt that a lot of people at Apple function this way today too.
I say this because that’s all intention is: just having an opinion to go about something a certain way. It doesn’t mean there was deep thought or meticulous calculation. And even if there was, that doesn’t mean the result will be good.
Apple’s image often presents design as a process where they uncover some kind of objective truth, but in reality, design—even at Apple—can be nothing more than a specific perspective. And sometimes that perspective is misaligned with users’ expectations.