[puranjay]

I've never worked at a large company, but how is it that a single designer is able to cook up something that looks and feels better than what a team of talented designers at a $500B company came up with - for a clearly important product?

[sleepychu]

I think part of it is business constraints. This designer respected Apple's aesthetic but didn't have some manager telling them to make 'Connect' happen.

[supercoder]

Because it takes hardly any of the real world constraints into consideration. If you're designing for the 15 artists / albums in his mockup, then yeah , this is fine. But that's not the real world case.

[eshvk]

Also things like qualitative user testing, a/b testing would go into every single pixel of his design. I am not particularly sure if the most important separation of the music listening population is into hoarders vs nomads. You'd evaluate that, make a decision. Things might get muddled there.

[qqg3]

Designing for the user vs design for the business. These two are fairly often very different demands and balancing that can be challenging.