Design Matters

Yashad Kulkarni37min

Speaker 0

00:08

Hey guys, what's up? As promised, I'm here with Scott Tom Scott has worked in product design at places like IDEO, IFTTT, Pinterest, and he's now a designer fund, he advises early stage startups about design. Essentially, you just think of him as like the goat of, of design. And we're really excited to hear from him. Before we do, I'm just going to remind you, audience q&a is open. So any questions that you have for Scott, please do put them in the chat, put them use that q&a button, and we will get to as many of them as possible. And with that, Scott, first, thank you so much for being here. And second, take it away.

Speaker 1

00:44

Well, thank you for that I have never been called the goat of design or anything. So I'll take that as a very high call coming from you, Jordan. Thank you, TechCrunch. And thank you all for for taking your time out of your day to join me on on the stage today to talk a little bit about design. Jordan already gave me a great intro here about a couple places that I've been before. And there's a couple topics, I wanted to share with you all that I think, you know, get bandied about quite a bit brand design process, working with designers. And I want to sort of illuminate or demystify these a little bit, because they these terms do get used so frequently. And hopefully, we can start from some common ground, especially as folks are building new companies, you want to think about these topics thoughtfully. And the goal here for this presentation is really to, you know, there's a spectrum of those terms being overly simplistic or maybe too complicated, and over my, you know, career as a design practitioner and leader to try to synthesize them for you to be hopefully useful. And they've worked for me at various stages of company building. And I hope they're useful for you as well. So the first is brand. Of course, the term comes from this idea of branding cattle that, you know, stretches back, I think 2700 BC, or even before that, to allow people to identify their cattle differentiate from one another, which whose cattle was whose. But in modern times, it's sort of gotten reduced to the term becoming about logos, right? When people talk about brands, oftentimes, the uneducated will say, what's your what's your logo, what's your brand logo. But on the other end of the spectrum, it is become really complicated to this is the Wikipedia entry for brand. And I would challenge anybody to digest this, absorb this and then be able to regurgitate it back to somebody and say, here's my understanding of brand. But a useful analogy that has stuck with me for many years actually comes from the book zag by Marty Marty neumeier. And he says that the closest word in the English language to brand is actually reputation. And I think that's a really great analogy. And so you know, the analogy of brand is to company as reputation is to person. There's a really interesting, here's a kind of funny explanation of it visually, the differences between marketing, telemarketing, public relations, advertising, graphic design, and branding, branding brand is about reputation. And this is kind of the analogy of people, right. But if you look at a logo, you know, this See, without any context probably connotes certain things, maybe the first word that came to your mind was cat. But if you change it, the meaning completely changes as well. Of course, this is the logo for Chanel. And with that logo comes all the associations of the reputation of the Chanel brand, the quality, the history, the prestige that comes with the luxury, and use in a different context, that C has a completely different meaning and has a completely different set of associations, so brands, reputations, if you can kind of link those two together in your mind. I think it's a really great place to start when you're having conversations about brands is what is that reputation? You know, what is the first impression? What are the consistent behaviors that your brand hopes to repeat over and over? What are the memorable moments that stand out that that stick out that make your brand your reputation memorable? The second is design and ironically, the term design suffers from a brand issue. Many designers have heard this before, make it pretty. I think that's on the simplistic side of what designers do is kind of the skin around whatever the product or service happens to be. But on the other end of the spectrum, you know, design hasn't doesn't as a word doesn't do itself any service, it has 14 different definitions and Merriam Webster dictionary, and they're all accurate. They're all correct. But as people use them in every day, you know, work. They are, they might have one definition in mind when another person is kind of receiving it on the other end, they have a different definition in mind.

Speaker 1

05:27

And to complicate things further, there's so many different disciplines within design, right? There's, you know, of course, as a TechCrunch, product design, UI UX. Those are what typically get referenced when we talk about design, but there are things like sound design, apparel, design, set design. So what is it that actually ties all these things? You know, these design disciplines together, if they're so vastly different, or can be so vastly different. And a great quote from Herbert Simon, American economist is that to design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. And that definition has stuck with me for many years, because it highlights two different states existing and preferred. When you're thinking about existing situations, you have to come to a kind of shared understanding of what is true today, with your product, with your service with your brand, whatever you're designing what works, what doesn't, and why. That's kind of the starting place for any new thing or incremental change that you hope to improve on. And then when you get to a preferred situation, what's embedded in the word preferred is like, Who is this preferred for? And how is this better for this audience for this audience, that you have some intent to make the situation better for. So really keeping those words in mind existing and preferred and the transition between them the intent behind the transition between the existing state and the preferred state is really something to keep in mind when you're thinking about design. You know, it's not just about the pixels at the end of it, it's the thinking that goes behind it. The third is process. You know, there are many different ways to talk about design process. But for those that have never worked with designers, maybe they think that the process is like magic, it's a black box. And oftentimes, design gets conflated with art. Oftentimes, design and art use some of the same tools. But they are very different purposes. They serve different purposes, art and design. But on the other end of the spectrum, what it's complicated is, we can try to diagram what the design process may look like. There's a human centered design process, there is the Double Diamond process from the British design Council. And these are attempts to sort of help bring folks that are not designers along on a journey, which can be quite confusing, and is not often linear. But we try to make it we try to tell the story that is linear to help kind of grasped what goes on, and what happens in this in the creative process. And, of course, what design deck wouldn't be, would be complete without a Steve Jobs quote, when you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and you live with the problem and peel back more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at very elegant and simple solutions. If I try to break that down and synthesize that into something that's been useful for me, in teams that I've worked on, or worked with, or LED, it's kind of two sides of the coin, designing the right thing, and then designing the thing, right? And what that kind of means is solving the right problem spending your energy figuring out what is the right problem to solve. And then once you figured out that, that right problem to solve, you've hit on something. How do you strive for the best possible version of that current solution? So a good designer, good design teams will think about both sides of this equation, are we designing the right thing? Or are we kind of spending our time polishing finessing, making sure that this is the best possible version of the current solution? And over time, the right thing ends up becoming dated or competition comes. And everybody kind of copies the idea. Maybe there's a need for innovation. So you might go back after designing the thing, right to designing the right thing again. I've also heard this articulated as problem seeking versus problem solving. And when you're building products, especially in software, there is no real end state. It is a iterative process. It's a dynamic process. You know, user needs change, business needs change, technologies change. And so there is this need to kind of vacillate Between problem seeking and problem solving.

Speaker 1

10:05

And of course, you know, working with designers can often be a varied process, depending on the kind of agency that you might be working with. Or if you have full time employees in house, or, you know, there are variances of where people are educated or what kinds of industries they've worked in before. So one way that I've heard and have talked about working with designers is thinking about the two ways of designing a service, or design as a partner. And when you think about design as a service, there is this kind of idea that there is a finite beginning and end to the relationship or the engagement. You know, there are many more steps than the oversimplification here. But at the beginning, there's some sort of statement of work, there's probably a number of check ins along the way. And at the end of the engagement, there are some sort of deliverables that are that are handed off. But when design is a partner, where it's really difficult to tell, where does the beginning and end happen, because there shouldn't be a beginning and end. This is of course, from Eric Reese's lean startup, the build, measure learn cycle. You know, I'd argue that really great product design, it requires iteration, whether that happens to be user facing all the time or happens internally, and then you release something, you have to kind of work through these iterations together. And great designers understand that building a version one is usually not the first the best version of anything, it takes many, many iterations to kind of get to a great solution, and refine and refine it and find to get to the kind of most pure form of it. So when you think about these and compare them, they can be used in different ways, right? There's a clear beginning and end when there's design as a service. But when it's design, as a partner, you're thinking about an iterative journey together with your cross functional partners, particularly product management, and engineering and technology startups. When you think about the kinds of profiles that you might bring to work on this, agencies, freelancers and contractors, oftentimes, what you would use for a service as a service, whereas in house full time employees, or embedded in teams, you have, you're thinking more of your designers, as partners. And when you have design as a service, you know, just by virtue of having this kind of clear beginning and end to the engagement, there's limited shots on goal, you have one opportunity maybe to get the project, right. But again, in building software, where it's kind of continuous, you're looking for this iterative journey together, where there's continuous improvement over time. So, you know, I know that's a lot for for ideas, but to just recap, brands or reputations. Design is about moving from existing situations, to preferred situations, and the questions that are embedded in those words. The process is about designing the right thing, and then designing the thing, right, and then kind of going back and forth between them. And when you think about working with your designers think of design as a service or design as a partner, neither is necessarily better than the other. But there are probably appropriate or more appropriate contexts to think about when you're kind of engaging with a relationship with your design team. So hopefully, there's some useful nuggets in there for you to take away. And I'm really interested to hear what your thoughts are, and have the discussion about it.

Speaker 0

13:32

Thank you so much, Scott, as a lot like you said, this is all good. And it all kind of makes sense in flows. The other, I wanted to ask you, you know, the audience's is getting involved here in the q&a. But before they do, I wanted to ask you, you know, we've seen a lot happen in the design industry, right, like in the design software space in the last like five to 10 years with envision and figma and Canva. What, like, do you have a preferred design software? Like for the designers in the room? Like, is there one that you prefer over others? Or is it kind of whatever suits your tastes? Or where do you stand on on that kind of battle that's being waged?

Speaker 1

14:16

I mean, I've probably use every tool under the sun. And they all have their kind of pros and cons. But you know, I've been very, very impressed with what figma has done in the last three to five, you know, three years or so. In fact, when I was at Pinterest, we had been using sketch for a very long time, we kind of kind of became the industry standard very quickly. And then figma, you know, slowly kind of came to parody with the feature set that that sketch had, but with the genius of collaboration on top of that, and many of the organizations that I've seen have started to adopt figma are adopting it not because just because designers love it, which they do, but also because non designers get a window into the design process as collaborators know before They start to see the final presentation or resort before they see a product get shipped. So I've been I've been very, very impressed with figma. And I have very, very high hopes that they'll continue to, to do well, in that space.

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