I began my work at Apple translating designs into HTML emails to be broadcast en-masse to Apple customers through an internally-developed system named Chatterbox. As happens with many internally-developed applications, over the years Chatterbox had far outgrown its original scope in terms of features, number of worldwide users, and the sheer volume of emails being broadcast to customers. This had all happened with no thorough analysis of the usability of its user interface — Apple’s business had been exploding quarter after quarter, and most efforts had been put into making the system cope with an ever-increasing throughput of emails.
Using Chatterbox day after day, the interface became increasingly frustrating to me and also to my fellow HTML coders in Cupertino. The UI was simply a mess, and it was slowing us (and dozens of Apple employees around the world) down and contributing to delays and mistakes in critical corporate communications (you can’t un-send an email, so any mistakes in outgoing messages are embarrassing… especially when they’re seen by millions).
Management agreed that the UI needed to be redesigned, and decided that the imminent 2.0 release, when many significant changes were being made under the hood and a new security model also had to be implemented, was the best time to do it. I proposed a sweeping reorganization of the UI and, to my surprise, Jason Winchell, the main backend UI developer on the project, committed to making it happen.
Over the next several weeks, Jason and I worked to completely rebuild the system’s UI — to make it immediately familiar to anyone who’s used iTunes or Mail, to reduce the number of clicks and page refreshes it takes to get things done, to enable searching and sorting through thousands of email broadcasts, to make it harder to make mistakes, and to accommodate the new, business-mandated security model with its myriad of user roles and permissions. The end result is a system that’s much easier on the eyes, faster to use, and will scale as new features are added.
My responsibilities on this project included:
This was a challenging but rewarding project, as we were able to significantly speed, simplify, and de-frustrate-ize the daily work of dozens of hardworking Apple employees around the world — work which is very important to Apple’s bottom line.
This UI redesign would not have been successful without Jason’s amazing work, but I also have to thank management (Greg and Chris) for their support, Grant and Jaya for their dedicated testing, and especially Ben Allen and Joe To for contributing valuable design & feature ideas, helping a lot with the XHTML/CSS development & debugging, and for graciously taking over my day-to-day responsibilities so I could focus on this project.
