Back from another trip to the valley, this time to Cupertino. Eug invited us to come “visit the mothership” which is nerd-lingo for going to the Apple Campus/Headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop.

We met up with Jeff, a really nice guy working on the Apple ad-campaigns, Bas Ording and Imran Chaudhri who are part of the 8-person UI design team responsible for OS X. It really blows my mind realizing that such a small team has done so much great work (exposé, dashboard etc.). Even Eug and the team of industrial designers, lead by Jonathan Ive, are only around eleven people and they are responsible for practically all the Apple hardware design (i.e Powerbooks, MacBooks, iPods, Cubes, Powermacs, Cinema displays – the lot!). The small teams make it possible the designers to have a relationship with each of the other team-members enabling tight cooperation and, dare I say, unstructured trust.

From an HCI standpoint it was interesting to hear that since Steve Jobs came back, Apple has cut down enormously on user-testings. Testing is obviously difficult when working on secretive projects but they seem to take the stand on a ideological level also. My guess is that this works well in a scenario where you have really talented designers with great feel for what the users want. One must also have great levels of trust in the other team-members which might only be possible in groups smaller than around 15 people. Due to the high levels of trust in each other and without interruptions caused by user-testing, the teams can work efficiently and fast.

I really started re-evaluating my own firm belief in user-testings as absolutely necessary and have come to think that testing in many cases actually can be replaced by skillful designers with great intuition/feel working in small teams where unstructured trust is made possible.