If you’re old enough to remember Apple laptops called Pismo, Lombard, Wall Street, and Toilet Seat from Bondi Blue days gone by, you may remember asking yourself the question “Why did they put the logo upside-down?”. The logo adorning the lid looked fine to the user about to open their laptop, but once opened onlookers were treated to an upside down illuminated Apple logo.
14 years later Joe Moreno, an Apple employee from 1998 to 2007, illuminates us on the logic behind this very deliberate choice. We all know that Steve Jobs really cared about the user experience. Perhaps we didn’t realize he considered it (at the time) more important than visual branding.
Joe explains in his blog that the decision came out of user testing. When the logo was pointed away from the user when closed…
…the design group noticed that users constantly tried to open the laptop from the wrong end. Steve Jobs always focuses on providing the best possible user experience and believed that it was more important to satisfy the user than the onlooker.
A quick glance at any current MacBook shows that Steve eventually reversed this decision, but the story is a great reminder of how seriously Apple takes the subject of human interface.
