A great consumer product is not just design driven nor just engineering driven. Instead, a great product exists at the intersection of engineering capabilities and design vision—and often engineering is pushed by design and design is influenced deeply by engineering.
I’m a designer, I love design and designing things, and while I think that it’s very easy to categorize a startup as a “design-focused startup,” that doesn’t really map to what a customer wants.
Customers don’t want design. People need to be careful when they’re too obsessed with the design of something. You see this a lot — products with really beautiful, fluid, smooth demos. People don’t have a void due to a lack of beautiful, fluid, smooth things. They have a void because they have a problem. Good design can help them get there, but design is not what they want.
Don’t obsess over design without purpose. Designing for the sake of making things cool — you won’t turn that into a sustainable business. Be careful with that.
What happens when we create an interface: one mind builds a way for other minds to interact with a thing. To lay the foundation of human-machine interaction you need to put thought into things and that requires that you put things into thought. This is why most interfaces suck, and most interfaces will continue to suck. No model, method, or tool will change that. Thinking is painful.
It’s interesting… People who use your product, all they see is the top layer, “the design.” I think the best product design teams create a framework of interaction upon which engineering, marketing, and other teams can build easily and confidently.