How do complex things like Ipods get built?

Factual Questions
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Yes I l know it’s an absurdly large question. I’m really mostly interested in a few “Who does this?” questions related to the actual industrial and engineering design process similar to the industrial design process described in “The Soul of A New Machine”, that details how a new machine arises.

If I’m staring at an Ipod Nano in my hand marveling over it’s sleek compactness or some other complex gadget, I do wonder about the genesis of the “machine” from idea to product. What are the typical design models? Is there one technical “Super Guru” who knows everything about how this machine is supposed to be built, and they direct all the other lesser engineers to do their bidding, or is it some kind of Borg-like group think where some marketing guy comes in with this little case and says “Make everything fit in here” and the engineers and designers scurry away to do his bidding on their little bit of the sub-assembly task?

What is the basic process of how something complex like an Ipod gets from idea to actual product on the shelf. Who starts the ball rolling? Who decides if it’s feasible? If it requires unique complex parts who decides if these can be economically mass produced? Who is the super-genius smart enough to oversee all this stuff and make sure some element isn’t screwed up? Is there a “super- genius” required in this process?

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Father of the IPod

Inside the Apple iPod Design Triumph

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Fascinating! Thanks!

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I once worked at Bose headquarters and the idea was similar. Dr. Bose who was an active MIT professor until a few years ago and a billionaire, would come up with many of the innovative product ideas himself. He would work out the equations to prove it could be done and then bring the ideas back to the company. From there, the ideas are developed by hundreds of people from electrical engineers to marketing and design people. He always made sure things stayed true to vision. I hear Steve Jobs does much of the same thing.

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You should also be aware of companies like Flextronics. If you’ve got an idea for a product like an iPod, they can do everything from just the assembly to the detailed design of the electronics, industrial design and software. A lot of electronics products nowadays are built by such outsourcing companies.

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I happen to design stuff for a living. Personally, I don’t think the Ipod is all that complex, and it was just kind of a natural extension of where technology was going at the time. Still, it’s a very good product, very creative in the way it is designed, and a very good design. A lot of credit needs to go to the marketing folks behind it as well.

Anyway, in any complex design, you first have to figure out what it is you are building. This is typically the job of marketing and/or management. Once you figure out what you are doing, a team is assembled. Usually there is a technical leader, a “guru” of sorts. It doesn’t have to be a super genius, but it does have to be someone with a lot of experience. I’m typically the lead engineer in projects I work on, and I certainly don’t consider myself to be a super genius.

Something like an Ipod has three main challenges. You’ve got an electrical circuit to design, you’ve got software to make it work, and you’ve got to mechanically package it into something small and neat looking. Your project may have a hardware lead, a software lead, and a mechanical lead, or one person may do more than one of those jobs, or even all three. There may be a non-technical project manager running the project, whose job is to track schedules and make sure the engineers and workers get the materials they need when they need them.

Let’s start with the electrical design. You’ve got to basically have a little miniature computer that can interface to stuff and play music, so it’s basically a miniature little computer with interfaces and an audio port. That’s easy enough to design. That’s not so easy to design in a teeny tiny little package, that has to be low power as well so it doesn’t suck batteries like there’s no tomorrow. But, this is what EE’s do for a living. In the old days, this was a long difficult process involving drawing out schematics, laying out boards by hand. etc. Now a lot of the grunt work is done by computer. You enter a schematic into a design package like Protel (what I use, there are others), then you make a circuit board in the design package, place the parts, route the critical signals yourself, and let the computer route the rest. Then you go back and look to see where the computer mucked up, re-route those signals, and you are done. You can even simulate how the circuit will work ahead of time to check for bugs, but you still need to build a prototype and test it. You fix any hardware bugs in the prototype, then make a final version which goes into production.

At the same time, you have software development going on. Since this is a miniature computer, it needs a miniature operating system. You can make your own, which is very time consuming, or you can buy one from someone. Apple makes their own operating system for their computers, so they may be able to use a stripped down version of it. For us other folks, there are tons of embedded operating systems available, including tiny versions of linux that we can get for free. Once you have an OS, you can start writing software to run on it. You need a user interface that controls all of the buttons and displays, and you need interfaces to the various computer ports, and of course you need something that can take MP3 data and convert it into sound.

The hardware design is also mostly done by computer these days. You need some sort of modelling package like AutoCad. There are a lot of ways the resulting pieces can be made. You can spit out drawings and send them to a machine shop for a prototype, which may be then used to make plastic molds. There are machining tools that can take the output of AutoCad or similar programs and can turn them directly into the parts you want, without needing a human in between except to operate the machine.

Once you’ve got your design done, and all the parts fit together and actually work, then you go into production. Hopefully you’ve done your design well so that it is easy to produce. An assembly line is set up. Many parts may be farmed out to other companies to produce for you, especially the circuit boards and the plastic shell, since these can be mass produced in china a lot cheaper than they can be made in the US.

For something like an Ipod, you are going to need a handful of people. You probably only need one circuit designer. There’s only one board, and more than one person is just going to get in the way. The packaging/mechanical stuff could probably all be done by one person as well. The software could be broken down into a few people. You could have one person concentrating on getting the OS running, another on the user interface, a third on the digital interfaces, and a fourth on the MP3/audio interface. It would probably take them six to eight months to make the first functional prototype, and the final released version would come out maybe six months after that. There’s also probably someone from quality control who has to look over things, someone from manufacturing who is going to set up the line, someone to write the documentation, and a group that tests the device. Someone like a project manager has to be watching over schedules and money. So, there’s a fair number of people involved besides just the engineering staff.

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engineer_comp_geek: That was a very interesting run-down on how these things are produced, but I still wonder where the design of the user interface fits into it? AFAIK iPods has a fairly intuitive and, a to some degree, novel interface and, again AFAIK, I would be very surprised if that was swomething that some ‘random’ engineer put together in an afternoon. I guess it must come early in process and that the people doing it would be knowledgable in that area?
As you write yourself, it is not that advanced tehnically, but it is my impression that the easy UI (as well as good marketing) made it the success it is.

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Pardon the typos ::blushes::

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That would probably be handled in design, which would be handled before passing the jobs out to the engineers. “Hey, this is what we want to make, now go make it real.” There is probably some back-and-forth involved, along the lines of “Uh, sir, we can’t make a holographic interface. Not at any price that would turn a profit, at least.”

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Generally, on the stuff that I design, the whole team has lots and lots of meetings to determine how the product will work from the user’s point of view. You need engineers in the meetings to tell you what is possible and not, and you need marketing folks and non-technical people who can tell you what is easy to use from their point of view. Sometimes its not really obvious what you need to do until you make the first prototype and put it in someone’s hand, then listen to what they complain about as they try and make it work. Sometimes the design of the thing just falls out from the original idea, and doesn’t change much from the original concept to the final product. It varies.

For something like an Ipod, the design of the user interface is critical to many other parts of the design, so most of the major details have to be ironed out very well near the start of the project. The design team may make mock-ups out of cardboard and such just to get an idea of what it will look like and how it will work. There was one product I worked on where we did a mock up using cardboard and stuff printed out on a color printer to simulate lights and buttons, and still when we got the first prototype in everyone looked at it and went “nah, that’s too clunky” and we had to redesign it.

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I do user interface design as well as software development. There is an art to it, as well as application of well known usability principles.

Typically, the first cut at a user interface will be done by a small team, or maybe even one person who has a reputation for understanding good usability design. He’ll often start by thinking up the ‘use cases’ that the device will be put to. It might just start out with a brainstorming session like this:

  • People jog with their mp3 players
  • they play them in the car
  • they use them on the bus
  • they listen while exercising on a treadmill
  • they listen while riding a bike
  • they listen to them in bed
  • they use them on campus
    etc. Then maybe you talk to the marketing people, and find out some numbers behind typical usage patterns, so you can order all this in terms of priority. Is it most important to be able to use the device easily in a car, or while jogging, or what?

The next set of use cases will be at a finer level:

  • people want to listen to music randomly
  • people have favorite songs
  • people switch from album to album, rather than listen to the whole thing
  • people have favorite artists
  • people want playlists
  • they wear them on their hip
  • they slip them in and out of pockets
  • they use them in the dark
  • they use them in bright light

etc. Now you go back to your ‘use cases’, and think about what’s important for each of them. For instance, if you’re using your iPod while driving, it might be critical that you don’t have to study the screen much, and that you be able to use the device with one hand. There are also ‘best practices’ in usability that you can apply. For instance, you don’t want someone to have to drill down through more than X levels of menus to get to a commonly used feature or a favorite artist.

Eventually, you’ll build up a matrix, sorted in order of importance to the user, of what your machine must do. Then you start playing around with prototypes perhaps. Will buttons work? How about a scroll wheel? Maybe an up-down rocker control? You work out prototypes (sometimes just on paper, or a simple model in styrofoam, or whatever), and pass them around the group and try to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t.

This is where the art comes into it. Brilliant designs are often the result of an ‘a-ha!’ moment where a good designer comes up with a novel solution to a common problem.

Then there’s some reality here too. Maybe a rocker arm would be perfect, but engineering tells you that they’re too expensive. You want a color screen, but it’s not profitable. Etc. So there’s some give-and-take between the various stakeholders in the project until some candidate designs are produced.

Next, a company will often undertake usability tests. They’ll bring people in off the street who know nothing about the product, give it to them, and record the experience. Can they figure it out without the manual? What do they try to do first? What slowed them down the most? This is important, because engineers are often too close to the design and understand it too well, and it clouds their judgement about what’s intuitive and what isn’t. That’s why so much software is produced that fits the brain of a software developer, but not the general public.

Usability tests will also uncover things you never thought of - that rocker arm that worked so great in the lab doesn’t work with a gloved hand. Or maybe it gets pressed by accident all the time when the machine is put into a pocket.

Etc. Often, how good the final design is comes down to nothing more than how much commitment the company has to getting the design right. There are always time and financial pressures. One of the things that Apple does that causes them to have better designs than most is to simply devote more resources to it. You’d be shocked how many products go out the door from other companies where only rudimentary effort is given to usability, simply because when projects get behind in time and over budget, managers are more likely to cut ‘intangible’ efforts like usability tests.

Apple expends the effort, and it shows in their products.

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Thanks :slight_smile: And I’m not really shocked. I’m studying Informatics/Computer Science and my special interest is design of UIs. It does seem though, that companies are beginning to get the idea that it can be profitable to make truly usable UIs - I’m hopeful at least. In a way it’s such a waste of work to make something that the user find difficult to use. But as you say, to many people usability tests and such seems an untangible effort and it is hard to predict exactly how much you can gain from them. But then, having done a few myself, I sometimes wonder why they don’t make that effort…

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There is always serendipity. While I suppose that cannot really come into play with complex products taking the reverse we have seen it happen. I always liked the story behind Post-It Notes as an example of this (and again I know this is about as uncomplex as a product gets these days but still an interesting story of development to final product).

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As an example of this, I read that the designer of the original Palm Pilot handheld created a mock-up in wood and walked around, pretending to use it with a stick or pencil as a pretend stylus, just to see if it was useful.

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There is some amazing information in this thread.
I too have been interested in the production of high technology device.
Using the example the the Ipod, does anyone know how long if takes from the initial idea to the time the device is delivered to the store. It sounds like it would take years.

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And don’t forget us documentation specialists!

Someone has to take the raw information from the software, hardware, marketing, and even legal people, and write the instructions for users, installers, and service people. I deal with electrical schematics, mechanical drawings, photographs, design descriptions, product specs, screenshots of user interfaces, legal documents such as license agreements, and many other source documents, all in dozens of different formats. I need to chase down engineers, marketers, and product managers to get this information.

To deal with all that, I need to know at least a little about electronic schematics and mechanical drawing. I also have to know how to process and convert all these files, so I can use their information as I write documents in my publishing program.

In addition to making sure that the documentation is accurate and matches the product, I have to make sure that terminology is consistent across different documents, that required warnings and legal info are included, and that documents conforrm to the desired corporate and product style.

I trade information with Training (developers of course material and instructors) to make sure that their information is consistent with mine, and vice versa.

If I’m lucky, I get to contribute feedback to the UI designers to help make sure that labeling and terminology in the software and its user interface are consistent with previous usage.

I may also be producing electronic files such as PDFs, or any one of half-a dozen formats of online help–and for best results, the documentation should be written differently for each output format.

When sending a document to print, I need to make sure that the desired colours, fonts, paper, and binding are present in the printed book. To do that, I deal with publishers and printers.

And then, on the glorious day when the manual is finished and signed off, I got to do it all over again. :slight_smile:

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In an ideal world, we would have years, and we would get all the details right. In this world, it’s anywhere from six to eighteen months.

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Other regular viewers of the Discovery channel (and related networks) are probably familiar with a stock footage montage usually used in programs about “smart” bombs, Operation Desert Storm, and the U.S. air force. It’s a collection of black and white video from the targeting systems of fighter-bombers, and some feeds from video-guided missiles, showing bridges, buildings, windows etc. getting blown up or rammed into. The usual.

However, one clip has intrigued me for awhile…it was taken from an aircraft, showing some big, clunky, bomber or cargo plane sitting on a runway for a few seconds, until some bombs or missiles blow it apart.

Alas, I was unable to find the video online…but it looked kinda like this crappy artist’s impression.

My question is: does anyone else have or remember that video, and if so, could they tell me what kind of aircraft that was getting hit? Was it an actual combat mission, or was it just a training target?

Yeah, this one’s probably in the running for “Ran’s most obscure question.” But I had to ask.

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CRAP! Sorry, that was supposed to be an OP. Mea culpa. :smack: :o

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While hardware engineer Tony Fadell did the first 70% of the work on the original iPod, someone else finished it.