Design as

Competitive Advantage

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Hi there,

My name is Andy and I run a relatively well known design agency in the UK called Clearleft.

I also founded Fontdeck.com, one of Europe’s biggest font embedding services for designers.

And over the past few years I’ve worked with and mentored dozens of start-ups. And one thing I’ve noticed is that few of them make full advantage of the power of design.

So I wanted to share some of my learnings with you.

Utility Trumps Design

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When you're creating something that's never existed before (like this death star) and it solves a particularly annoying problem (like the rebel scum), people tend not to care how well it's designed.

They simply want a product to be in existence and make the problem go away.

We can see this lack of concern about design in many early products,

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Early electric

Hair Dryer

like this commercial hair dryer.

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Early electric

Hair curlers

these electric hair curlers

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Early device for

the treatment of hysteria

Or this device for treating victorian ladies for hysteria.

It’s clear from all these examples that the aesthetics and user experience of these products weren’t considered when they were created.

They were first and foremost engineering problems.

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Design flaw

However in the rush to market, many of these products contained critical design flaws.

Like the electric curlers tendency to set people on fire.

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Early adopters

Despite this you will always find a few early adopters.

In fact most of the people working on start-ups fall into this category.

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Utility vs usability

People willing to use a product for the value it brings, irrespective of what it looks like or how hard it is to use.

If you’re not careful, this can give start-ups the sense that their product is perfect and they’ve hit the jackpot.

However over time, less forgiving users will come on board and they’ll start to notice all the little problems with the product.

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It’s Ugly

They’ll notice that it’s ugly

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It’s Confusing

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It’s Difficult to use

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And if your not careful, that can spell “game over” for any growing company

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Your competitors

Will try to out do you

Because very soon some young entrepreneur will come along and try and out do you.

In the early stages this will be on the engineering front.

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Making it smaller

They’ll make your product smaller

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Making it faster

They’ll make it faster

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Packed with features

Or they’ll add lots of extra features, like adding a touch screen to the front of a fridge.

Incidentally the only reason I can see for the existence of a Smart Fridge is the fact that digital displays and wifi units have got so cheap, the cost of putting them into white goods is minimal.

So it’s like the 80s when suddenly everything had a digital clock in it.

A classic case of design being driven by what’s technically possible rather than desirable.

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Technology becomes a commodity

Now competing on technology is great for a while.

However over time the engineering advances alone will stop being compelling. 

And very quickly your “must have” product will become a commodity.

This is the point at which most companies start to take design seriously.

Design becomes important

over time

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This is partly down to pressure from other competitors.

Partly down to consumer demand.

And partly down to trends.

To me the interesting thing with these slides is that you’re witnessing the development of three different products take place over around 100 years.

With digital products, people expect the same pace of change over 5 years.

Design becomes important

over time

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This is partly down to pressure from other competitors.

Partly down to consumer demand.

And partly down to trends.

To me the interesting thing with these slides is that you’re witnessing the development of three different products take place over around 100 years.

With digital products, people expect the same pace of change over 5 years.

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The importance of aethetics

When most people think about design they tend to focus on aesthetics or surface level appearances.

And this is indeed an important aspect of design.

After all, you can use beauty to drive desire and set you apart from the competition.

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Good design drives desire

For instance if you think about heavily commoditised products like headphones, design really is one of the few avenues for competitive advantage left open to you.

In this case, Beats by Dr Dre have managed to corner the headphone market by building a powerful brand around design, despite what many audiophiles would claim to be sub standard hardware.

It amazes me how so few start-ups have managed to do the same and build up a compelling digital brand.

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Aetherics only go so far

However aesthetics will only take you so faras anybody who has ever tried to make orange juice using this Philip Stark juicer will attest to.

Good design is so much more than just what something looks like. It’s also about how something behaves when used.

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New technology is often

viewed as complicated

You see, a lot of new products are designed by super users and end up looking like this.

And while this solution may have all the features super users want, most people feel intimidated by this level of complexity.

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Design can simplify

One of the benefits that good design can bring is it’s ability to simplify. To ditch that which is confusing or unnecessary and focus on the core of the product.

This will help you expand into new areas and attract the less experimental customers. The ones that just want your new product to work, and work seamlessly.

So the best designers work to develop a deep understanding of how your customers use your products.

And then design products around their needs.

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Testing is essential

To do this, testing is essential.

Because no matter how logical things may seem on the drawing board, when you put things in the hands of real users, unexpected things start happening.

This is one of the foundations of user-centred design.

Dieter Rams 10 principles

of good design

If you’re still not sure what good design looks like

Legendary Braun designer, Dieter Rams, created a set of core principles which drove his work.

These include...

■ Makes a product useful - A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

■ Is innovative - The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

■ Is aesthetic - The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products are used every day and have an effect on people and their well-being. Only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

■ Makes a product understandable - It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user's intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory.

■ Is unobtrusive - Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user's self-expression.

■ Is honest - It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

■ Is long-lasting - It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today's throwaway society.

■ Is thorough down to the last detail - Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

■ Is environmentally friendly - Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical andvisual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

■ Is as little design as possible - Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

Is  innova)ve

Makes  a  product  useful

Is  aesthe)c

Makes  a  product  understandable

Is  unobtrusive

Is  honest

Is  long-­‐las)ng

Is  thorough  down  to  the  last  detail

Is  environmentally  friendly

Is  as  li<le  design  as  possible

Dieter Rams 10 principles

of good design

If you’re still not sure what good design looks like

Legendary Braun designer, Dieter Rams, created a set of core principles which drove his work.

These include...

■ Makes a product useful - A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

■ Is innovative - The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

■ Is aesthetic - The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products are used every day and have an effect on people and their well-being. Only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

■ Makes a product understandable - It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user's intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory.

■ Is unobtrusive - Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user's self-expression.

■ Is honest - It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

■ Is long-lasting - It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today's throwaway society.

■ Is thorough down to the last detail - Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

■ Is environmentally friendly - Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical andvisual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

■ Is as little design as possible - Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

Good design is like a

detective story

For me, good design is like a detective story

It’s a case of pulling together all the different clues in one place, sifting the evidence, spotting patterns and playing out your hunches.

Bad designers are like the detectives that try and get a quick conviction, no matter whether the person is guilty or not.

Good designers workspaces

look like this

Which is one of the reasons that a good designers workspace typically looks like a crime has been committed.

And incidentally, if your designers work spaces don’t look like this, I’d wonder why.

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Kano Model

Designers have built up various tools to help them design great products.

One of my favourites is the Kano Model

[Explain]

Minimum viable productMinimum desirable product

The creation of delight is a very important characteristic, and something I’ve spoken about at length in the past.

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Designing for delight

However adding stuff like this to your product isn’t the type of thing you’d see on your average user story or Kanban board.

In fact, the nice little features are usually the first things to be cut, in favour of extra features or a faster product.

So designers play a very important role here as product champions.

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Mail Chimp excels

at delighting their customers

A company that always manages to delight it’s users is MailChimp.

They manage to turn the simple act of sending a marketing email into a joy.

Zappos is another, oft used examples of this.

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Mail Chimp excels

at delighting their customers

A company that always manages to delight it’s users is MailChimp.

They manage to turn the simple act of sending a marketing email into a joy.

Zappos is another, oft used examples of this.

Market-driven design builds the success of the products marketing into the product itself”

Seth Godin

“ Seth Godin quote

One of my other product design heros is Seth Godin.

Seth talks a lot about the power design has when marketing your products and suggests that most companies would be better off diverting their marketing budges into product design.

So rather than building average products and having to spend a lot of money promoting them, it’s better to build remarkable products that promote themselves through word of mouth.

Dropbox Designs

This is exactly what Dropbox did when they diverted the bulk of their marketing spend ($233-$388 per user) into improving the user experience on their product.

“we spent almost all our effort on making an elegant simple product that just worked and made users happy”

What they ended up doing was creating a product that worked seamlessly and their users loved them because of this.

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Build a product

people love

And after all, when we talk about design what we’re really talking about is building a company your users will love.

And frankly, unless you’re building developer tools like GitHub (which is awesome btw) you’re going to want to have designers at the centre of this process.

Triple threat

Because when you pull all these different aspects of design together it becomes incredibly powerful and you end up with something like Nest.

It’s a beautiful piece of product design making a boring commodity product typically selected by your heating engineer, into a sexy design statement.

However it’s also incredibly easy to use because it was based on a deep understanding of user behaviour. This this is a product that learns about its users and changes based on their behaviour.

We’re shifting to an experience economy where an experience is becoming the primary economic offering”

Joseph Pine

“

A lot of this comes down to another aspect of the modern world that I’ve talked about before in the past.

The fact that we’ve moved from a product or service model to an experience model.

Products and services have become a commodity. More and more people these days are looking to pay for experiences.

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User Experience Design

This is one of the reasons we've seen the rise is discipline like user experience

A way of designing products not just based on what they look like, but how they feel when used.

Create something that is

difficult to replicate

So I see good design as a business strategy.

As a way of creating something that’s difficult to replicate.

Because design is hard.

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Competing on design

is hard

Lots of companies are attempting, but many are failing.

Which is why the consumer electronics market is filled with “me to” clones.

Until recently companies like Nokia were really struggling to produce good designs, despite having some really good designers and employing a user centred approach to R&D.

I’ve spoken to many people at Nokia who were working on “innovative features that first debut in the iPhone” many years ago.

You need great designers

So how do you compete on design effectively?

The first thing you need to do is hire good designers.

However unless you’re a design led company, it’s really hard to judge the quality of a designer.

Not all designers are

created equal

So most start-ups will go onto a site like Dribbble, find a “hot young talented designer” and make them the lead designer at your start-up.

You then tell them what you want and they go away and design what you imagined.

Don’t hire stylists

If you do this, you’ll end up with a stylist rather than a designer.

Somebody who is good at mimicking current design trends, but lacks the initiative or experience to solve the complex problems.

They’ll spend their time trying to make you happy by replicating what’s in your head, rather than trying to make your clients happy

Incidentally this guy is from a crazy TV show called “Hair Battle Challenge”.

Real designers don’t wow

with crazy ideas

Where they do crazy things like make hairstyles that look like the Eiffel tower

Short runway

Sadly a lot of start-ups begin by hiring juniors with idea that they will bring in senior designers in later on.

The juniors may be able to pump out designs very fast but the quality will be low, as will the likelihood that they’re designing the right thing.

Good design actually takes quite a bit of time, so you need to start as early as possible before your runway runs out.

There’s nothing like realising that your product is failing because it’s badly designed, when it’s too late to do anything about it.

I’ve seen far too many companies come to me after a year and a half of working with mediocre designers and still not where we could have got them in 6 months for about the same price.

However they naively believed they were gaming the system and that their less experienced designers could have done the same job as us in 6 montsh for a third of the cost.

Hire the best designers

you can afford

So my advice would be to hire the best designers you can afford at the start of the process.

You can always transition to less experienced (and expensive) designers once the really hard problems have been solved.

You need design thinkers

So instead of stylists you need design thinkers.

People that can challenge assumptions, untangle messy design problems and can get you to the right solution as quickly as possible.

These kind of designers can add a huge amount of value to your start-up.

Not least because they can stop you wasting valuable time on design dead-ends.

However this level of skill is difficult to find and costly.

Get a design co-founder

Better still, find a design co-founder.

This is becoming much more common these days.

In fact some of the biggest start-up success stories of late were co-founded by designers.

And I think the quality shows.

The important design decisions

happen at the start

One of the reasons to have a design co-founder is that some of the most important design decisions you will make happen at the start.

This is because an interface design is just the manifestation of your company values and business model. If you get that wrong, no amount of visual tinkering will make the product work.

This is why the better designers want to be involved with projects as early in the pipeline as possible. If you only call in your designers once all the important decisions have been made, there is little they can effect.

Build a culture

of design

The other benefit of having either a design co-founder or a relatively senior designer on board at the start is that great designers attract other great designers and can build a strong culture of design in your organisation.

Just in the same way that a great CTO can build a culture of innovation and excellence amongst your engineering team.

So if design is important to you, a well known and senior designer could be a huge asset.

Design is

a team sport

That being said, don’t fall into the trap that design is just one persons job.

The design of your product is the responsibility of everybody in the company, from the founder, down to the QA person.

There is no

B-Team

So you need to integrate design through the whole of your team.

Just make sure that you have at least one good designer directing the activities.

Silicon Valley is waking up

to the power of design

In my opinion Silicon Valley is starting to wake up to the power of design.

We’re seeing funds set up that invest purely in design companies.

And in the last 6 months I’ve had 2 different friends have their design agencies acquired by Facebook and Twitter, purely for the design talent.

So the search for design talent is hotting up at the moment, and a senior design team can really add to your valuation.

Lean Start-up

is good for design

I think Lean start-up has largely had a positive effect on design.

One of the biggest benefits has been this idea of “customer development” and the need to get out of the office and learn from your users.

This is something that designers have been saying to their bosses for years, so I’m glad it’s finally catching on.

Lean UX

Which is why I think programme like LUXr are very interesting as they aim to teach start-up founders some of the basics of UX design.

However this doesn’t mean that you can supplement good designers by sending your development team on a week long course.

Blindly following analytics

doesn’t count as design

However one thing I’d caution against is the current trend that says that analytics and A/B testing are the way to design your product.

I liken this driving a car by looking only at the satnav.

It’s an amazingly useful tool and can definitely help guide the design process.

However if you don’t have a skilled driver and refuse to look out of the window every once in a while....

Local maxima

You’ll do what this driver in England did and get stuck down a dead end and be unable to get out again.

In the design world we call this a local maxima.

The use of analytics and testing to optimise the existing product, where there could actually be a much better solution out there if you only look hard enough.

3 THINGSThe Start-up WorldNeeds To Do

So in summary I think I have 3 important messages for the start-up community.

Realise thatDesignAdds Value

First off you need to realise that design adds value and invest accordingly

Build a Culture ofDesign

Hire the Be$tDesignersYou Can Afford

And I think with those three things in place, you’ll be able to go out and build even better products that make your customers happy and bring you the returns you’re looking for.

@andybuddwww.clearleft.com

andy@clearleft.com

It’s our job to make great products.It’s your job to help ensure that happens.Please help.

@andybuddwww.clearleft.com

andy@clearleft.com

I

Create something that is