What every designer in a startup should understand
- Transfer
The likelihood that your startup will be perceived by users with a bang is higher when the company’s visionary is at the helm of the company, and not a cond programmer. Such a bold thesis sounds in the column of the designer’s girl who decided to “show us what a convenient post should look like ”.
Sometimes design means any synonyms for the word “attractiveness”, but in reality, high-quality design includes much more. After starting their own startup El Moon (Elle Luna), a leading designer Mailbox cmdlet , concluded that the design - it is not so much the pursuit of external beauty as "a way of thinking about everything" and shares with readers his observations.
At the heart of any startup is the desire to meet the needs of people not yet covered by the existing services market. The designer's work is based on the desire to create a bold vision of the future. However, being a designer and being a startup designer are completely different things. After working at IDEO for about five years, I quit and left for a startup. Here are the three most amazing facts about design and the role of a designer in a startup that I discovered for the past year.
Traditional quantitative consumer research will not help you anticipate, envision, and envision the future. Remember Henry Ford's famous saying: “If I asked people what they needed, they would answer that they want faster horses.” Focusing on focus groups and audience surveys to assess the needs and desires of the user, at best, serve to improve usability, as they are based on modern, current realities.
User-oriented design (characterizing a startup) is something much more complex. This is a way to manage your company, where the consumer is in the center of attention, and you are trying to independently learn, understand and analyze the needs, desires, hopes and expectations of people based on their feelings, words and actions, and create a product of the future using this knowledge. But to ask the focus group itself to imagine the future - this, in fact, means to ask them to complete the work of the designer. Absurd.
Steve Jobs is known for his belief that good design can create a product that anticipates the needs of the user: “It is incredibly difficult to design a product using focus group research. As practice shows, people don’t know what they need until you show it to them. ” At the same time, Apple is a deeply and confidently consumer-oriented company. Instead of relying on the opinion of focus groups, they create the product the way they themselves want to see it. For this reason, in 1998 they decided to lay more memory in the new iMac in order to achieve the optimal screen size and simplify its use. At that moment, Jobs commented on this decision: “It must be a computer that we also want to install in our office.”
You can let the development team live the lives of users of their product. Look at their house, life, feel on themselves what they encounter daily. Believe me, your innovation will look completely different in the context that will actually surround it. Another solution is random street-people interviews with which you will show a model of your product and get feedback on it. This method is fast, unreliable, but very funny. In the end, in order to better understand your consumer, you can organize what IDEO calls “Answer at Lunch” (lit. “Whine and Dine”) when a conversation about a product takes place over food and drinks.
These methods do not apply to either analysis or prediction. They help you just start working together with the consumer, find out what he needs or wants, what is not yet on the market. As soon as you determine who your user is and what he needs, keep this sacred knowledge as the apple of his eye, because it contains inexhaustible opportunities for your company.
Design culture and engineering culture - little overlapping spaces. The design team is bold, strives for experimentation, improvisation, is not afraid of failure on the path to success (understands that it learns from its mistakes). The development team, on the contrary, tries to delve into the subject, find an elegant solution, suitable even for controversial cases, works in a concentrated and measured manner. In addition, all the engineers I know are not enthusiastic about the failures.
All this year I worked in an office created in the image of IDEO: wide tables for several people at once, open space, a large number of meeting rooms. It seems that such an organization of the premises will prompt people to a dialogue, will keep both designers and developers up to date, and will increase the transparency of the company. But in our case it turned out differently. Designers behaved quite noisily, emotionally, they liked to work to music. For developers, such conditions were unbearable and distracted them from work.
Therefore, instead of convincing designers to make friends with developers, we went to a hardware store and bought a truck of foam blocks, from which we built a wall. Suddenly, developers had a safe haven for two-thirds of the office, where they could write code in silence, and designers in the remaining third of the room could arrange a disco and arbitrarily discuss the appearance of the buttons.
Result? At the level of daily interaction, people suddenly began to enjoy weekly meetings, rather than trying to kill one another. At a deeper cultural level, teams began to show respect for each other.
Accept the fact that the culture of design and engineering is completely different. Design will successfully answer the questions “how could we ...?”, While the development will provide all the details on the way to the realization of the idea. And if you want to produce a world-class product, surround these teams with tools, space and support that will allow you to implement your plan. Remember that the teams complement each other - and you need both of them. This is exactly the case when 2 + 2 = 5.
A startup brings the values of its creators to the world. Point.
If the team of creators does not consist of designers or people with similar thinking, it is unlikely that the product will be anything more than a beautiful curtain, or a tablecloth. The founders of the company represent the heart and soul of the whole company: the more they “light up”, the more all its employees will burn, and when people who love the product manage the company, the results are simply amazing. This is all because a startup driven by design designs not only and not so much a product as its own culture. (This is the mission of The Designer Fund , a fund entirely dedicated to investing in startup founders).
Take Dropbox for example. The company has only three official designers , and the founder,Drew Houston is a self-taught programmer. However, the Dropbox team is crazy about the design of its product: it is incredibly simple, easy to use, intuitive and serves a clear task. The product is just magical. And all this is because - even if he does not call himself a designer - Houston thinks in a designer way, and this affects the whole product. Dropbox is a great example of such thinking with the creator of the company. Actually, this is what I want to convey: for a design to work effectively for the benefit of a startup, it must be in the head of those who manage the company.
But design does not only apply to the product itself. This is a way of thinking about everything. This is a way out of the conversation with investors, an approach to making decisions in a state of uncertainty in the early stages of the project, a critical analysis instead of accusations, the development of ideas that could potentially delay the release of the project for months, the path from “quite successful” to “excellent” .
Let's call a spade a spade and rethink the role of a designer. Design does not mean to make a thing beautiful, it means to create a vision of the future, the difficult task - if not impossible, to imagine, create and sell a great new product, if the foundation of the company is not tailored to solve really complex problems in the face of uncertainty and lack of clear criteria, it is "good."
Since the task of the designer is to anticipate, predict tomorrow, and a startup is created in order to realize it today, this is a fundamental partnership that is exactly what allows the designer to realize himself, and you need to build a design-oriented startup. Be brave, rely on this rule and create the future. Well, embody it, of course.
Sometimes design means any synonyms for the word “attractiveness”, but in reality, high-quality design includes much more. After starting their own startup El Moon (Elle Luna), a leading designer Mailbox cmdlet , concluded that the design - it is not so much the pursuit of external beauty as "a way of thinking about everything" and shares with readers his observations.
When creating a user-friendly design, do not rely on consumer research results.
At the heart of any startup is the desire to meet the needs of people not yet covered by the existing services market. The designer's work is based on the desire to create a bold vision of the future. However, being a designer and being a startup designer are completely different things. After working at IDEO for about five years, I quit and left for a startup. Here are the three most amazing facts about design and the role of a designer in a startup that I discovered for the past year.
IDEO has “anti-focus groups”: consumers are given materials to create a prototype of the ideal running shoe in their opinion
Traditional quantitative consumer research will not help you anticipate, envision, and envision the future. Remember Henry Ford's famous saying: “If I asked people what they needed, they would answer that they want faster horses.” Focusing on focus groups and audience surveys to assess the needs and desires of the user, at best, serve to improve usability, as they are based on modern, current realities.
User-oriented design (characterizing a startup) is something much more complex. This is a way to manage your company, where the consumer is in the center of attention, and you are trying to independently learn, understand and analyze the needs, desires, hopes and expectations of people based on their feelings, words and actions, and create a product of the future using this knowledge. But to ask the focus group itself to imagine the future - this, in fact, means to ask them to complete the work of the designer. Absurd.
Steve Jobs Introduces New iMac or “How Your Computer Will Look Like Today”
Steve Jobs is known for his belief that good design can create a product that anticipates the needs of the user: “It is incredibly difficult to design a product using focus group research. As practice shows, people don’t know what they need until you show it to them. ” At the same time, Apple is a deeply and confidently consumer-oriented company. Instead of relying on the opinion of focus groups, they create the product the way they themselves want to see it. For this reason, in 1998 they decided to lay more memory in the new iMac in order to achieve the optimal screen size and simplify its use. At that moment, Jobs commented on this decision: “It must be a computer that we also want to install in our office.”
You can let the development team live the lives of users of their product. Look at their house, life, feel on themselves what they encounter daily. Believe me, your innovation will look completely different in the context that will actually surround it. Another solution is random street-people interviews with which you will show a model of your product and get feedback on it. This method is fast, unreliable, but very funny. In the end, in order to better understand your consumer, you can organize what IDEO calls “Answer at Lunch” (lit. “Whine and Dine”) when a conversation about a product takes place over food and drinks.
These methods do not apply to either analysis or prediction. They help you just start working together with the consumer, find out what he needs or wants, what is not yet on the market. As soon as you determine who your user is and what he needs, keep this sacred knowledge as the apple of his eye, because it contains inexhaustible opportunities for your company.
Design and development do not get along with each other
The final version of the Mailbox logo required hundreds of studies of draft logos
Design culture and engineering culture - little overlapping spaces. The design team is bold, strives for experimentation, improvisation, is not afraid of failure on the path to success (understands that it learns from its mistakes). The development team, on the contrary, tries to delve into the subject, find an elegant solution, suitable even for controversial cases, works in a concentrated and measured manner. In addition, all the engineers I know are not enthusiastic about the failures.
San Francisco's IDEO offices are open spaces for ongoing dialogue and exchange of ideas.
All this year I worked in an office created in the image of IDEO: wide tables for several people at once, open space, a large number of meeting rooms. It seems that such an organization of the premises will prompt people to a dialogue, will keep both designers and developers up to date, and will increase the transparency of the company. But in our case it turned out differently. Designers behaved quite noisily, emotionally, they liked to work to music. For developers, such conditions were unbearable and distracted them from work.
Therefore, instead of convincing designers to make friends with developers, we went to a hardware store and bought a truck of foam blocks, from which we built a wall. Suddenly, developers had a safe haven for two-thirds of the office, where they could write code in silence, and designers in the remaining third of the room could arrange a disco and arbitrarily discuss the appearance of the buttons.
Result? At the level of daily interaction, people suddenly began to enjoy weekly meetings, rather than trying to kill one another. At a deeper cultural level, teams began to show respect for each other.
Accept the fact that the culture of design and engineering is completely different. Design will successfully answer the questions “how could we ...?”, While the development will provide all the details on the way to the realization of the idea. And if you want to produce a world-class product, surround these teams with tools, space and support that will allow you to implement your plan. Remember that the teams complement each other - and you need both of them. This is exactly the case when 2 + 2 = 5.
You can't go back to design at the end of development
design thinking affects all aspects of the company
A startup brings the values of its creators to the world. Point.
If the team of creators does not consist of designers or people with similar thinking, it is unlikely that the product will be anything more than a beautiful curtain, or a tablecloth. The founders of the company represent the heart and soul of the whole company: the more they “light up”, the more all its employees will burn, and when people who love the product manage the company, the results are simply amazing. This is all because a startup driven by design designs not only and not so much a product as its own culture. (This is the mission of The Designer Fund , a fund entirely dedicated to investing in startup founders).
Take Dropbox for example. The company has only three official designers , and the founder,Drew Houston is a self-taught programmer. However, the Dropbox team is crazy about the design of its product: it is incredibly simple, easy to use, intuitive and serves a clear task. The product is just magical. And all this is because - even if he does not call himself a designer - Houston thinks in a designer way, and this affects the whole product. Dropbox is a great example of such thinking with the creator of the company. Actually, this is what I want to convey: for a design to work effectively for the benefit of a startup, it must be in the head of those who manage the company.
But design does not only apply to the product itself. This is a way of thinking about everything. This is a way out of the conversation with investors, an approach to making decisions in a state of uncertainty in the early stages of the project, a critical analysis instead of accusations, the development of ideas that could potentially delay the release of the project for months, the path from “quite successful” to “excellent” .
Let's call a spade a spade and rethink the role of a designer. Design does not mean to make a thing beautiful, it means to create a vision of the future, the difficult task - if not impossible, to imagine, create and sell a great new product, if the foundation of the company is not tailored to solve really complex problems in the face of uncertainty and lack of clear criteria, it is "good."
Since the task of the designer is to anticipate, predict tomorrow, and a startup is created in order to realize it today, this is a fundamental partnership that is exactly what allows the designer to realize himself, and you need to build a design-oriented startup. Be brave, rely on this rule and create the future. Well, embody it, of course.
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