mutants vs designers

Mutants vs DesignersWhy startups beat incumbents on product design

Thursday, August 23, 12

How exactly are startups setting the bar for design and making large companies look

like amateurs?

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More specifically...

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Why didn’t Intuit build Mint?

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Why didn’t Google build Sparrow?

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Organizational differences and people

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What’s different about the people?

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They’re not people, they’re X-Men.

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X-Men?

• Comic books, man.

• X-Men are mutants, but more specifically the next evolutionary step, born into a world of humans.

• These humans are dinosaurs, a walking dead blip in the evolutionary line.

• Being a human sucks.

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Am I mutant or human?

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Well, what type of designer am I?

• Human factors?

• Interaction designer?

• Visual designer?

• “User experience designer”? (beers on me if more than two people in the room agree on what that actually is...)

• Developer? (wait a minute...)

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Oh snap. I’m a human.*

• *unless I do 3 or more of the things on the previous slide. Then I’m a mutant!

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To mutants, these aren’t functional roles.

• They are disciplines.

• Designers do most, if not all of them.

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In fact, they do more of just about everything.

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mutants do human factors work

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mutants do interaction design

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mutants do visual design

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what did he just say?

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(It doesn’t matter than you’re not “that kind of

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Why visual design?

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How it looks vs how it works is a false

dichotomy

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really.

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Tesla vs Chevy Volt

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Jura vs Keurig

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Dyson vs everyone else

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AirBnB vs Couchsurfing

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Etsy vs Ebay

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How it looks informs how it works

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mutants write code

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WTF did he just say?

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Why should designers write code?

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A craftsperson understands her

medium

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Imagine a sculptor who had never chiseled

stone

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Imagine a landscape architect who had

never planted a garden, or studied erosion

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Imagine a real estate developer who had

never pounded a nail or studied building code

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A printer who had never made paper, or

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And they simply hand over a spec for

someone else to make

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Crazy right?

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But this is what we do

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“These people don’t really exist though...”

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But they do.

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Ben Silbermann

• Designer

• Developer

• Business/product guy

• Pinterest cofounder (on to new project)

• 19 years old

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Our summer intern

• shipped two games to app store

• has his own company of three people

• does all his own visual design

• just turned 15

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Everyone future designer under the age

of 12

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So mutate yourself

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But mutants on their own weren’t X-Men.

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They were often maligned, outsiders,

prey.

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Until they found Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

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This was a special place.

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Computer science, history, combat...

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These new types of designers, these

mutants, need the right environment too.

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Most Big Co’s...

• Slow

• Deep specialization

• Segregated groups

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Startups are different

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Speed is king

• no one waits for a spec to write code

• no one waits for design mocks either, or they generally shouldn’t

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Small, cross disciplinary teams

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Environment

• open spaces

• everything is temporal

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Designers embedded with developers, side by

side

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Designers implementing their own

work

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X-Men.

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uh, cool... so now what?

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become a mutant

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then mutate your organization

• Embed yourself with developers

• Provide value to the implementation teams

• Seek open spaces

• Throw out the spec

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What if my company won’t change?

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The X-Men didn’t have it easy either.

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Until they found Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters

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Go find your own. It’s out there.

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Godspeed, mutants.

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