What every designer in a startup should understand

The likelihood that your startup will be perceived by users with a bang is higher when a visionary designer is at the helm of the company, and not a cool programmer. Such a bold thesis sounds in the column of the girl designer , who decided to "show us how a convenient mail should look like."

Sometimes design means any synonyms for the word “attractiveness”, but in reality, high-quality design includes much more. After launching her own startup El Luna (Elle Luna), the lead designer of Mailbox , came to the conclusion that design is not so much a desire for external beauty, but a “way of thinking about everything” and shares her observations with readers.

When creating a user-friendly design, do not rely on consumer research.

At the heart of any startup is the desire to meet the needs of people who are not yet covered by the existing services market. At the heart of the designer's work is the desire to create a bold vision of the future. However, to be a designer and to be a designer in a startup are completely different things. Having worked in IDEO for about five years, I left everything and went to a startup. Here are the three most amazing facts about design and the role of a designer in a startup that I discovered for myself over the past year.

IDEO has “anti-focus groups”: consumers are given materials to create a prototype of an ideal, in their opinion, running shoes

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Traditional quantitative consumer research will not help you to foresee, imagine and draw the future. Recall Henry Ford's famous saying: “If I asked people what they needed, they would answer that they want faster horses.” Focusing on the 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, today's realities.

A user-oriented design (characterizing a startup) is 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 deeds, and create a product of the future using this knowledge. But to ask the focus group itself to imagine the future is, in fact, to ask them to do the work of a designer. Absurd.

Steve Jobs introduces the new iMac or “how the computer will look like today”

Steve Jobs is known for his belief that a good design can create a product that anticipates a user's needs: “It is incredibly difficult to design a product using focus group research. As practice shows, people do not know what they need until you show it to them. ” At the same time, Apple is a company that is deeply and confidently focused on the consumer. Instead of relying on the opinion of focus groups, they create a product the way they want it to be. It was for this reason that in 1998 they decided to put more memory into the new iMac in order to achieve the optimal screen size and simplify its use. Jobs at the time commented on this decision: “It should be a computer that we also want to install in our office”.

You can let the development team live the life of the users of their product. To look at their home, life, to feel for 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 interviews of people from the street to whom you show your product model 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 “The Answer at Lunch” (lit. “Whine and Dine”), when a conversation about a product happens over food and drinks.

These methods do not apply to analysis or to the forecast. They only help you to start working together with the consumer, to 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 your 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 demanded hundreds of studies on rough logos.

Design culture and engineering culture - spaces of little intersecting. The team of designers is bold, striving for experiment, improvisation, is not afraid of failure on the path to success (realizes that it learns from its mistakes). The development team, on the contrary, tries to penetrate into the subject, to find an elegant solution, suitable even for controversial cases, it works intently and measuredly. In addition, all the engineers I know are not happy with failures.

IDEO offices in San Francisco are open-source 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 push people to a dialogue, will allow to keep up to date with the current affairs of both designers and developers, and will increase the transparency of the company. But in our case it turned out differently. Designers behaved quite noisy, emotionally, they liked to work with music. For developers, such conditions were unbearable and distracted them from work.

Therefore, instead of convincing designers to make friends with the developers, we went to the hardware store and bought a foam block truck, of which we built a wall. Suddenly, the developers had a calm harbor for two-thirds of the office, where they could write code in silence, and the designers in the remaining third of the room could arrange a disco and discuss the appearance of the buttons as much as they wanted.

Result? At the level of daily interaction, people suddenly began to rejoice at the weekly meetings, instead of trying to kill each other. 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. The 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 enable you to carry out your plans. Remember that the teams complement each other - and you both need them. This is exactly the case when 2 + 2 = 5.

You can not go back to the design at the end of development

design thinking affects all aspects of the company

A startup carries 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 something more than a beautiful curtain, or a tablecloth. The founders of the company are the heart and soul of the whole company: the more they are “set on fire”, all its employees will burn, and when the company is run by people who love the product, the results are amazing. This is all because a design-driven start-up 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 the founding designers of startups).


Take, for example, Dropbox. 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 their product: it's incredibly simple, easy to use, intuitive, and serves a clear task. The product is just magical. And all this because - even if he does not call himself a designer - Houston thinks in design, and this is reflected in the whole product. Dropbox is a great example of this thinking from the creator of the company. Actually, this is what I want to convey: for the design to work effectively for the benefit of the startup, it must be in the head of those who steer the company.

But design refers not only to the product itself. This is a way of thinking about everything. This is a way out of a difficult situation in a conversation with investors, an approach to making decisions in a state of uncertainty at the early stages of the project, a critical analysis instead of accusations, working out ideas that could potentially postpone the release of the project for months, the path from “quite successful” to “excellent” result .

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 creating a vision of the future, a difficult task - if not impossible, to imagine, create and sell a great new product, if the company's foundation is not designed to solve really complex problems in the face of uncertainty and lack of clear criteria. is "good."

Since the designer’s task is to anticipate and predict tomorrow, and a startup is created in order to embody it today, this fundamental partnership is exactly what allows the designer to realize himself, and you - to build a design-oriented startup. Be bold, rely on this rule and create the future. Well, embody it, of course.

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