Didier Hilhorst, Flipboard, Warm Gun 2012

My best work—by far—has been in close collaboration with
engineers many times smarter than I am. I’ve been pushed.
I’ve been challenged. I’ve done things I thought I wasn’t
capable of doing.

Thursday, November 29, 12

From the Valve Handbook:

“Inside the company, though, we all take on the role that
suits the work in front of us. Everyone is a designer.
Everyone can question each other’s work.”


Engineers can and should be designers too. You don’t need
advanced sketching skills to explain your idea on paper.

Products are for people.


From Don Norman:

“[...] designers are mostly unschooled in the content areas
in which they work. It is this combination of great insight
and ignorance that produces my simultaneous delight and
dismay.”


To minimize dismay, or ignorance, I started to code—for
better or worse. HTML, CSS, Javascript, Xcode... It helps to
know and understand the tools. Let designers break stuff,
but in a safe environment (yes, that excludes production!)


Design for engineering and engineering for design—or how
to balance workﬂow in a startup.


The Sofa The Kitchen Table The Ofﬁce


The Sofa


It’s messy. It’s chaos. It’s a messy chaos. Your biggest
challenge isn’t process, it’s getting a product out the door
for the world to see. You can ﬁx that Gantt chart later.


Sketch things—a lot of things. Try things out. Move quickly
in order to ﬁnd what works and what doesn’t. Oh, and since
you’re so small, you don’t need massive documentation of
decisions—it ﬁts (mostly) in your brains.


At this stage, for a consumer product, design and
engineering are equally important. You need both. Do it
from the start, not as an afterthought. It’s amazing how
much one designer and one engineer can get gone.


The Kitchen Table


You shipped—congratulations!

Or you didn’t... But still, the team has grown. Sitting on the
sofa gets to be awkward. You have now graduated to the
kitchen table. Yay!


The kitchen table is larger. It ﬁts more people. It ﬁts more
opinions too. More designers, more engineers. Process
starts to matter. It’s likely that you will have to explain ideas
more than once.


Email is great for communication, but it’s terrible for trying
to design a product. Avoid making any decisions over email
—unless you ﬁnd ﬂame wars in your inbox entertaining.
That’s why you have a kitchen table; use it.


Prototyping is an amazing tool. Static designs hardly
convey the interactivity that are common in applications of
any type. But over time I found deminishing returns.
Prototype responsibly...


Bell curve of prototyping

Also known as engineer happiness
Effectiveness

Completeness of prototyping
Also known as design world domination


Everyone wants to build something that matters. Debate
respectfully with each other. Question design. Question
code. A kitchen table is the best thing for great product
conversations, it’s where art meets science.


The Ofﬁce


Your product is successful. You’re growing more. Actually,
you’ve outgrown your kitchen table. People not sitting at
the table get pissed off. Decisions take time. Inefﬁciencies
creep in. Welcome, you are now a legit company! Sort of...


As teams grow the key is to try to maintain some of that
magic of early days within a startup. Of course it’s not the
same, but the way engineers and designers work together
shouldn’t change dramatically—avoid isolation!


In conclusion: this talk should really have been entitled
“Designers Are Wankers And Engineers Are Lazy.” Just
kidding of course...

Thank you, and say hi on Twitter @didierh


Didier Hilhorst, Flipboard, Warm Gun 2012

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Didier Hilhorst, Flipboard, Warm Gun 2012