Design for Start-Ups

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,

Early electric
Hair Dryer

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like this commercial hair dryer.

Early electric
Hair curlers

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these electric hair curlers

Early device for
the treatment of hysteria

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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.

Design flaw

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

Like the electric curlers tendency to set people on ﬁre.

Early adopters

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Despite this you will always ﬁnd a few early adopters.

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

Utility vs usability

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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.

It’s Ugly

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They’ll notice that it’s ugly

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

Your competitors
Will try to out do you

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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.

Making it smaller

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They’ll make your product smaller

Making it faster

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They’ll make it faster

Packed with features

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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.

Technology becomes a commodity

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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.

The importance of aethetics

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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.

Good design drives desire

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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.

Aetherics only go so far

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However aesthetics will only take you so far
as 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.

New technology is often
viewed as complicated

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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.

Design can simplify

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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.

Testing is essential

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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.

Dieter Rams 10 principles
of good design

Is
innova)ve Is
honest
Makes
a
product
useful Is
long-‐las)ng
Is
aesthe)c Is
thorough
down
to
the
last
detail
Makes
a
product
understandable Is
environmentally
friendly
Is
unobtrusive Is
as
li<le
design
as
possible

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.

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.

Kano Model

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

One of my favourites is the Kano Model

[Explain]

Minimum viable product
Minimum desirable product

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

Designing for delight

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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.

Mail Chimp excels
at delighting their customers

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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.

Seth Godin quote “ Market-driven
design builds the
success of the
products
marketing into the
product itself”
Seth Godin

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.

Build a product
people love

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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.

User Experience Design

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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.

Competing on design
is hard

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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 THINGS
The Start-up World
Needs To Do

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

Realise that
Design
Adds Value

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

Hire the Be$t
Designers
You 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.

@andybudd
www.clearleft.com
andy@clearleft.com

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

@andybudd
www.clearleft.com
andy@clearleft.com

I

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