Design is good from the start to the never-finish. We don’t know the right way to do design yet. We should be constantly learning to help it evolve, adapt and change for the better.
When I tell other designers about Pollenizer’s lean approach, they often assume because we move fast we are releasing half-baked designs and products into the world. That’s not the case.
Why is there a notion that spending a significantly long time designing something will equate to good design? I’m not saying let’s just design off the cuff taking only 2 seconds but I just don’t think time should be the preemptive factor for design quality. At this point you’re probably waving an Apple product at my face and yelling “this is years of perfecting the perfect product”.
I respect that.
Other than having the bank account to do that, they had a visionary with superman precision to dictate the next big shift and hundreds of prototypes to test out their fundamental idea. We’re a Startup armed with only an idea and hope to create a viable product. We prototype the hell out of the fundamental idea and test it in the real world with potential customers… Within 3 months. We need to learn about our customers’ reactions to our product and change fast when we need to.
At this point I must emphasise, what customers touch is designed. It is the best user experience as it can be at that particular point in time. It is drawn from the designer’s research, experience and vision. As a designer, we have the obligation to tell the product story and create user logic for the product’s usage and its features. It is also our duty to continuously refine it. Most of us can agree there is no purer form of feedback to help refine that experience than users’ real-time reactions.
Too many startups have gone and passed. Few failed entirely because of bad design. Most failed because they didn’t test and learn enough to realise their fundamental business idea was flawed. If the core is flawed, no fantastic design can save it. Even if it took the designer two years to ‘perfect it’.