Design Is More Than Just A Craft
Review of ‘The Way to Design’ by Steve Vassallo
Organizations have developed from being just a engineer or a developer focused field to being design centered. Most companies like Amazon or Google have reinvented themselves to match design levels to improve usability and comfort for their users. While companies like Slack and AirBnb were launched with better designed products from the start. The bar set to start a new company has never been higher because the cost to prototype, produce and launch has become much cheaper, faster and more efficient.
Due to the hard work of David Kelly, Bill Moggridge and Steve Jobs, users want more easier interactions with technology with no hassles. Users will move to a product that has better interaction and design that is easy to use than the badly designed competitor products. Design is all about asking the right questions and one of the right questions for a product is does it solve a problem and how does it solve a problem.
Even Facebook has a feature where if you do not log in to it for 30 days, Facebook sends you a link to your mail to log back in within 24 hours without a password to counter human forgetfulness.
Solve a problem that is personal to you, a problem that you live in. Be married to the problem. Be so close to it that you understand it from the inside out.
JOE GEBBIA
Steve Jobs has had the most impact on consumer expectations due to his influence in the role of design in technology. When Steve Vassallo interviewed design leads for big companies, he learned that the role model or the reference point for these designers was Steve Jobs. Below is the five steps Steve Vassallo listed as the way to become a great design leader.
1.Think Big
An example of this is Steve Jobs wanting to make a dent in the world of technology from his garage in Cupertino. He did this not by his design sensibilities alone but by starting and running influential companies. To make it in the design world, even our smallest solutions need to have a much larger vision for impact on a greater audience. Once you solve a problem, more problems arise from the solution and those prompt the questions to how people around the world can face. Designers need to prepare to think massive.
2. Get Smart On Business
If you are not a designer focused on business or the financial aspect of running a company, you should find a suitable partner who has a good foundation in business. And even if you do so, you should also learn the language of business in case your partner decides to leave the business. We have to embrace and learn the concepts and practical skills of business that are a necessary set of tools.
3. Be An Advocate For Design
You have to be the voice of design as it is the most valuable thing that you will be bringing to the companies of the future. We have to show people that design is what can save a company and also show them that they have to esteem design and not count on it as just a small cog in the operation. The design can affect the way people think about a particular product and help them to trust and use the product even if it only offers a simple solution.
4. Break Out Of The Craft Box
You have to choose wisely for the right things to pay attention to when creating a product or a brand. The focus should not all be concentrated on detail to one problem but also to the bigger picture. The ratio between strategy and creating pixel perfect design has to be well tuned because the company is the craft now. Designers have to take an equal part of the responsibility and the risk in a startup.
5. Design A System For Repeatable Genius
As designers, we have to let our ego go and work alongside others who are talented in their fields toward one goal through processes and storytelling. One person cannot work alone on a project and hope to make a dent in the universe. It takes a team of like minded people with similar goals and specializations to share a vision and make it real.
Design Foundation For A Startup
By far the most important thing you can do to empower design within your organization is to have a designer in your founding team. You can’t do it any other way… If the goal is to have a human-centered product, you need people who value human-resonant products in your company.
by EVAN SHARP
To have a successful human centered product, there must always be a human centered designer founder in your company. Design should be included in the decision making of every business strategy, if not, it will become a facade. To have a successful startup, you need to have highly motivated people in the team who know how to manage their time and work for the best interests of the company. Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, has designed an organization that designs great outdoor apparel by people that have the freedom to do so by self-governance.
Designers have to keep trying to do the impossible and make it more possible with every solution they come up with. Instead of looking at problems negatively, we must look at them as challenges that we can fix with solutions. A simple prototype by cardboard can create visual ideas for conversation and solutions for further expansion. Designer cofounders need to be at the center of all processes concerning the company and should be integrated into the company at the earliest possible moment to make the entire company design centered and focused.
Users Always Come First
The end-users must always come first in the business strategy and this is comes easily to designers. It makes sense to see why Steve Vassallo talks about building trust from the customers rather than to cash in on small transactions. Small transactions make little money while building trust gets a much bigger fan base and attracts new customers every minute.
Steve Vassallo worked with Cisco on a desk phone product in 1998, where they had to think all about the user and the interaction with the phone that they were designing. They landed after a lot of needless features and functions to make a phone that was easy for a new user to use.
Having a perspective that is similar to the user is what the designers bring to a company to make it great.
From Process To Profit
What will make a company great is the design value of creating great design products again and again. Steve Jobs did the same by launching new product categories at Apple five times when he was the CEO. It’s because he had created sets of patterns and protocols which is a form of methodology for design thinking. Design thinkers need to work on prototypes and make ideas together with other people to test out solutions that would work.
A perfect solution is something that keeps developing over the course of time and not just a single product. If every person on the team is a design thinker, creative solutions will flow and the confidence in your business will grow to be greater in your startup. Even at AirBnb, problems are assessed with design thinking and solutions are provided in multiple ways and they are tested by experiments. Every company is different and we have to find our own process to make it a repeatable genius.
Summary
Empathy is a useful tool for designers, but to be led by empathy is not meaningful because using empathy has limits and is being overused in the design world. To get the best out of empathy, find out the market research and then make adjustments.
The Iceberg Model is a helpful way to explain the concerns that drive systems thinking. We have to monitor the events, observe the patterns, create the structures and preserve our values in our mission statements.
Rather than attempt to design a wholly new, perfect solution, oftentimes it’s better to find areas where an incremental change will lead to significant renovation in the system. The smallest nudge for the biggest effect. Steve Vassallo
To read the article on ‘The Way to Design’ by Steve Vassallo, click here: https://thewaytodesign.com/
