Mutants vs Designers
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Transcript of Mutants vs Designers
Mutants vs DesignersWhy startups beat incumbents on product design
Thursday, August 23, 12
How exactly are startups setting the bar for design and making large companies look
like amateurs?
Thursday, August 23, 12
More specifically...
Thursday, August 23, 12
Why didn’t Intuit build Mint?
Thursday, August 23, 12
Why didn’t Google build Sparrow?
Thursday, August 23, 12
Organizational differences and people
Thursday, August 23, 12
What’s different about the people?
Thursday, August 23, 12
They’re not people, they’re X-Men.
Thursday, August 23, 12
X-Men?
• Comic books, man.
• X-Men are mutants, but more specifically the next evolutionary step, born into a world of humans.
• These humans are dinosaurs, a walking dead blip in the evolutionary line.
• Being a human sucks.
Thursday, August 23, 12
Am I mutant or human?
Thursday, August 23, 12
Well, what type of designer am I?
• Human factors?
• Interaction designer?
• Visual designer?
• “User experience designer”? (beers on me if more than two people in the room agree on what that actually is...)
• Developer? (wait a minute...)
Thursday, August 23, 12
Oh snap. I’m a human.*
• *unless I do 3 or more of the things on the previous slide. Then I’m a mutant!
Thursday, August 23, 12
To mutants, these aren’t functional roles.
• They are disciplines.
• Designers do most, if not all of them.
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In fact, they do more of just about everything.
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mutants do human factors work
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mutants do interaction design
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mutants do visual design
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what did he just say?
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(It doesn’t matter than you’re not “that kind of
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Why visual design?
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How it looks vs how it works is a false
dichotomy
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really.
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Tesla vs Chevy Volt
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Jura vs Keurig
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Dyson vs everyone else
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AirBnB vs Couchsurfing
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Etsy vs Ebay
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How it looks informs how it works
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mutants write code
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WTF did he just say?
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Why should designers write code?
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A craftsperson understands her
medium
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Imagine a sculptor who had never chiseled
stone
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Imagine a landscape architect who had
never planted a garden, or studied erosion
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Imagine a real estate developer who had
never pounded a nail or studied building code
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A printer who had never made paper, or
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And they simply hand over a spec for
someone else to make
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Crazy right?
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But this is what we do
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“These people don’t really exist though...”
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But they do.
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Ben Silbermann
• Designer
• Developer
• Business/product guy
• Pinterest cofounder (on to new project)
• 19 years old
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Our summer intern
• shipped two games to app store
• has his own company of three people
• does all his own visual design
• just turned 15
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Everyone future designer under the age
of 12
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So mutate yourself
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But mutants on their own weren’t X-Men.
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They were often maligned, outsiders,
prey.
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Until they found Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.
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This was a special place.
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Computer science, history, combat...
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These new types of designers, these
mutants, need the right environment too.
Thursday, August 23, 12
Most Big Co’s...
• Slow
• Deep specialization
• Segregated groups
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Startups are different
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Speed is king
• no one waits for a spec to write code
• no one waits for design mocks either, or they generally shouldn’t
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Small, cross disciplinary teams
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Environment
• open spaces
• everything is temporal
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Designers embedded with developers, side by
side
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Designers implementing their own
work
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X-Men.
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uh, cool... so now what?
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become a mutant
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then mutate your organization
• Embed yourself with developers
• Provide value to the implementation teams
• Seek open spaces
• Throw out the spec
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What if my company won’t change?
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The X-Men didn’t have it easy either.
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Until they found Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters
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Go find your own. It’s out there.
Thursday, August 23, 12
Godspeed, mutants.
Thursday, August 23, 12