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Via Learnlets, we hear that Business Week reports on Apple Engineering Manager Michael Lopp’s SxSW presentation on Apple’s design process It’s brief, it breaks some conventional wisdom with design process ideas about fidelity, and it totally meshes with what I’ve heard from friends who work there before they silence themselves.

Pixel perfect mocks and the practice of presenting 10 different good mocks for any possible feature to management especially fly in the face of widely taught design practice. Generating low fi to avoid detailed critique does takes a certain low-fi literacy from audiences I’ve designed for — a literacy that isn’t always there — and sometimes does end up with surprises as things end up needing reconfiguration when visual design is seriously considered down the line. And though I was also taught the designer should advocate for one design they feel ls best when in front of the client, when the client starts nitpicking the design to deal with the ways in which the design doesn’t sit well with them, I have wished I could just show radically different options to give them a sense of the space they won’t be able to enumerate with their verbal suggestions.