The iPhone and Direct Manipulation

In January 2007, Steve Jobs held up a phone with no keyboard, no stylus, and almost no buttons, and told the audience it worked like magic. The industry assumed he was bluffing. Every competing smartphone, the BlackBerry, the Palm Treo, the Windows Mobile devices, put a physical tool between your finger and the screen, then buried the menus three levels deep. Jobs mocked the stylus on stage ("Who wants a stylus? Yuck.") and bet the opposite way. Within three years nearly everyone had copied him.

For anyone building a product, this is a case about the distance between what a user wants and what they have to do to get it. It sharpens the question of how many tools, steps, and intermediate objects sit between intent and action in your own product, and which ones should not exist at all. The principle Apple proved, and how to apply it to your own workflow, is the part the app holds back.