I know there are a lot of these types of posts floating around, but I wanted to talk quickly about something that Steve Jobs made me realize as a designer.

At a party last week I was having a discussion with a banker about design. It was another world to him and he was extremely curious. He asked me a simple question.

“How do you know what people want?”

And I told him that a designers job isn’t to figure out what people want, it’s to give them something they never knew they wanted.

There’s a famous quote allegedly from Henry Ford (the automobile maker):

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

And it was true for Steve Jobs and Apple.

If you want a peek into this, take a look at a discussion forum the day Apple announced the first iPod.

The first response sums it up perfectly.