Short Takes

A company’s single most important marketing tool is a well designed product people love using everyday.

The best designs work at a perceptual level rather than an intellectual level. As soon as a user starts reasoning about how to use your product rather than the goal they are trying to achieve with it, you know you’ve missed the mark.

When designing products, there is an “obvious” solution, an “ideal” solution and a “right” solution. The three are rarely the same, and you often have to fully articulate the flaws in the first two before you can get someone to accept the third.

The best wines come from grapes that had to struggle in less than perfect growing conditions, but were not exposed to such extreme difficulty that their development was stunted or stopped. Helping designers develop is like cultivating the grapes that will one day produce the finest wines.

The development process is the design process.
It doesn’t matter that a great staff of great designers created great designs if those great designs never ship as a product. The product we deliver is what we as a complete organization designed (business, execs, PM, Eng, sales, design…). Successful design thinking can’t be delegated to any single department. 

Great design cultures make every decision’s impact on a product’s design obvious, intentional and manageable.

The most important design decisions are often not made by designers.