December 22, 2011
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Design Staff is a new blog devoted to helping startups design great products, and based on the two short months they've been posting, it's a site you'll want to follow if you're a small business owner or startup.
Design Staff was founded by the user experience team at Google Ventures, and headed up by Braden Kowitz, an interaction designer and partner at Google Ventures. Design Staff content contributors include an additional half dozen designers, researchers and developers from Facebook, Uber, Adobe Typekit, AngelList and AirBnB.
"I decided to start Design Staff as a community for both entrepreneurs and designers to help one another build better products," says Braden. "There are just so many questions flying around from both entrepreneurs and designers who want to work with them: How do I get through just one iteration of a user-centered design process? How to I interview and hire a designer? If I'm a designer, how do I pick the right startup to join? How do I work with a fast-moving engineering team?"
Design Staff has a few great design tips for startups right out of the gate.
1. Don't hunt for unicorns
Seed-stage startup looking for rockstar junior designer to sketch wireframes and design beautiful mockups. You’ll be responsible for crafting our logo and brand and writing UI copy. Must know how to run usability studies, prototype and write production-ready HTML and CSS.
"I read ads like this all the time," states Kowitz, "and I think Great! There’s a team that understands all the skills they’ll need! But I also think, They’re looking for a unicorn—a magical designer who can solve all their problems. It’s too bad unicorns don’t exist.
According to Kowitz, job postings like this don't work for several reasons. Even if you find a unicorn designer with all those skills, actually doing all those things at your company is a huge amount of work," states Kowitz. "One full-time person probably isn’t going to cut it. The best designers, the ones who are experienced, will read a job listing like this and be able to tell that the author is asking too much from a single person. It’s a signal that the author is not familiar with user-centered design, and it can scare away good designers.
The better choice is to know and prioritize which few skills matter most and should be covered in-house. "The rest can either be covered [by a] part-timer or simply done without," advises Kowitz. "There are some tough tradeoffs to be made."
So what are the toughest choices and how do you make them? Design Staff gives two additional tips.
2. Hire a user researcher. "A huge part of user-centered design and lean startup methodology is getting out from behind your desk, out of the office and talking to your customers," says Kowitz.
"Is there someone on your team who does this naturally, who loves talking to customers? A good user researcher can be your eyes and ears. They can help you understand what your customers really want, and why they might not need your product. They can measure whether your customers even understand how to use the software you’ve shipped."
"User research has been an indispensable part of the product design process. And for anyone building consumer-facing products, I highly recommend working with a user researcher from the very beginning."
3. Fit talent to task. What's more important for a startup: visual design (how it looks) or interaction design (how it works)? "Luckily, it’s common to find designers who are good at both," sates Kowitz. "Both skill-sets are required to build great products, and both are core to how customers understand and perceive the product."
But most designers are better at one than the other, so what do you do? "If you can only hire one designer, you’ll have to decide which skill set is more important for the product you’re building," recommends Kowitz.
Focus on visual design if your product:
- Must be more delightful than competitors (e.g. games)
- Needs to appear credible, well built, and high quality (e.g. finance)
- Creates a space that people aspire to be a part of (e.g. communities)
Focus on interaction design if your product:
- Has many features, but needs to feel simple
- Supports complex tasks and flows, and is used every day
- Is mobile-based (and can lean on a mobile platform’s visual style)"
Kowitz is treating Design Staff as a community, and as an experiment, promising to listen to readers in order to improve the site. "My hope is that we can bring together some of the best designers, researchers, product managers, and founders to talk about the lessons they’ve learned while designing products at startups," he says.
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Cyril de la Torre 5 months ago
Great article, a rare find nowadays.Touching on some points 1. Don't hunt for unicorns. This is a problem not only startups but most SMB face, the other extreme is corporations that need to have a long line employs to produce average results due to poorly managed longer cog.Essentially the do it all for no money doesn't exist. I would suggest hiring a brand consultancy or a senior designer to nail down the basics for you brand strategy including persona development and then get someone affordable to implement your strategy2. Hire a user researcher. A brand consultancy will cover this point although a User experience designer is highly recommended3. Fit talent to task. I don't think it should be either or. Again a good designer will cover both sides and you shouldn't need to compromise on either aspects. In the worst case scenario hire the interaction designer and create a strong story around your product or service that can be consistently told around all marketing collateral including your website.For more insights follow me on @cyrildelatorre