Steve Jobs User Stories: Start With the Customer Experience

Agile software development typically begins with user stories which are informal descriptions of software features from the customer's perspective (UX). When I worked at the Apple Online Store, my boss's boss would meet with Steve Jobs. Steve would tell us the user experience he wanted without trying to solution it, himself. In other words, he left the development details to the talent (developers and designers).

You got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. And I've made this mistake probably more than anyone else in this room and I've got the scar tissue to prove it.

– Steve Jobs

Start With Customer the Experience

In 2006, the iPod was booming along with the third party ecosystem it created. In a meeting, Steve Jobs let it be known to us that, when he was at the Apple Online Store website, he wanted to be able to see any product within three clicks. How long and how many clicks it takes to find what you're looking for is a good base metric for usability.

The challenge with three clicks, back then, was that Apple sold about two hundred different types of headphones. Displaying all of the headphones that Apple carried, at once, on a single web page would overload our servers. (Back then, there was no cloud computing.) Alternatively, paginating the results into batches of 10 or 25 wouldn't satisfy Steve's customer experience requirement. So, what to do?

One of my coworkers came across a new UI solution, infinite scrolling. Infinite scrolling allows content to load continuously as the user scrolls down the page, below the fold, eliminating the need for pagination. We now take infinite scrolling for granted on account that it's ubiquitous on popular social media sites. But, back then, it was new and it turned out to be the perfect solution for Steve.