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初创公司中的设计师必须掌握的要点

发布时间:2012-11-13 17:36:44 Tags:,,,

作者:Elle Luna

对于任何初创公司来说,他们必须拥有能够满足任何需求的热情。而作为这些初创公司中的设计师,他们则必须拥有能够创造出大胆的理念的热情。一般设计师与初创公司中的设计师完全不同。在IDEO工作了5年的我选择自己创建一家初创企业。而以下我将分享在初创公司中扮演设计师角色时所吸取的经验教训。

game designer(from gamecareerguide)

game designer(from gamecareerguide)

基于用户研究并不能创造出以用户为核心的设计。

在IDEO,开发团队始终遵循着“离焦小组”的原理,即提供给用户自助的原型材料,让他们去创建属于自己的内容。

传统的定量用户研究方法并不能帮助你预测到未来。就像Henry Ford曾经说过:“如果我最初问消费者他们想要什么,他们应该会告诉我,‘要一匹更快的马!’”使用焦点小组和调查方法去预测消费者的需求不可能对未来的发展带来多大的帮助,因为这只是关注于现状。

以用户为核心的设计与此完全不同。这是指发现,理解并深受用户的需求,希望和想法的启发,真正重视他们所说的,所感受到的以及所做的(或不愿意做的)。让焦点小组去预测未来也就等同于让他们去完成设计师的工作,简直是无稽之谈。

史蒂夫·乔布斯创造了iMac,或者说为我们呈现出“今后电脑该有的姿态。”

史蒂夫·乔布斯始终坚信优秀的设计定能创造出满足用户需求的产品。就像他所说的:“我们很难基于焦点小组去设计产品。很多时候人们都不知道自己想要什么,直到你把它摆在他们面前。”苹果便是一家以用户为核心的公司。比起依赖于焦点小组,他们更关注于设计用户想要的产品。所以他们才会在1998年将大量的资本投入于创造新的iMac,设定了最佳屏幕尺寸并简化了整体的用户体验。就像乔布斯那时所说的:“我们自己也希望能在书桌上看到这样的电脑。”

一种方法便是让你的设计团队深入用户的家中,第一手了解到这些用户的生活。当你掌握了用户的生活环境后,你便能够提供给他们与众不同的内容。另一种方法便是在路上随机访问路人,呈献给他们一件低保真度的原型并询问意见。这种方法的成效最快,并且非常有趣。了解用户的最后一种方法,也就是IDEO所说的“聚餐”,即在美食与美酒的环境中与用户展开交谈。

这些方法既不是关于测量,也不是关于预测。相反地,以用户为核心的设计是围绕着用户而展开——明确他们的需求,愿望和行为。当你确定了服务对象以及他们的需求后,你就需要牢牢把握住这些内容,并将其作为公司最重要的发展机遇。

设计和编程不能混为一谈。

促成优秀的编程文化与创造优秀的设计文化的特性并不相同。设计团队是在实验中不断成长着,他们不畏惧失败,并将失败当成学习的主要推动力。而工程团队则是在理解中成长着,不断思考着各种边界案例的解决方法,据我了解,工程师们都不是很关心各种失败。

IDEO在旧金山的办公室便让成员们可以通过公开交谈而交换彼此的意见。

IDEO office(from waynehodgins)

IDEO office(from waynehodgins)

去年我们的工作室便遵照了IDEO的工作模式,即只设置了几张大型公共桌子,没有墙壁,留下更多交流空间。你可能认为这种公共空间有利于推动设计师与工程师之间的交流,提高各部门工作的透明度,但是事实上却并非如此。设计师总是喜欢将音乐调至最大声,并热情地咨询其他成员有关设计意见。但是工程师却需要心平气和地工作,所以很容易被这些大声响搞到分心。

所以比起做一些无用功让工程师变得更像设计师,或者让设计师变得更像工程师,我们选择到家得宝(游戏邦注:美国家居连锁店)购买一些大型泡沫塑料板,以此竖起一堵墙。如此,工程师便拥有了安静的编程环境,并占据着整个办公室三分之二的空间,而设计师也能在剩下的三分之一空间里自由地播放音乐,尽情地拉高音量讨论各种设计内容。

如此的结果是?基于日常层面,成员们开始会因为每周的会议感到兴奋(而不再反感开会);而基于更深层次的文化层面,两个团队间的尊敬感也将油然而生。

的确,设计和工程是两种截然不同的文化。就好比设计是用来回答“我们该怎么做?”,而工程则是用于思考实现一个理念所需要做到的各种细节。如果你想要创造一件世界级别的产品,你就需要围绕着这两种独特的文化,使用适当的工具,空间和支持去做到这一点。这是两种相互补充的文化,二者缺一不可。把握了它们,你就能够实现“2+2=5”的创想。

设计不能是事后才考虑的内容。

设计思维将影响着公司中的所有元素。

初创公司总是能够传达创业团队的价值观。

如果一个创始人团队并不包含设计师或设计思想者,他们最终便只能提供一些只注重外表的内容。创始人代表着公司的核心和灵魂:创始人的目标便是公司的目标,如果一家公司的运行团队热爱产品,他们最终便能够创造出非常出色的产品。因为基于设计的初创公司不只会设计他们的产品,同样也将设计他们的文化。

例如“Dropbox”(游戏邦注:一个提供同步本地文件的网络存储在线应用))。它只拥有三名正式设计师,而其创始人Drew Houston则自称是软件工程师。但是“Dropbox”的开发团队非常沉迷于产品设计:这将是一款简单,容易操作且具有直觉性的产品(满足了用户的核心需求)。尽管Houston不认为自己是名设计师,但是他却是一名设计思想者,并将其设计思维传达到整个产品上。“Dropbox”便是该公司所坚持的设计思维操作的最终产物。所以为了确保设计能在初创公司中发挥功效,你就需要确保它能作为公司的核心理念。

但是设计并不只是关于产品,设计也是一种思考方法。例如在与投资者交谈时你是如何处理未知内容;在形成早期理念并进行早期探索时你是如何解决模糊的定义;这是关于如何批评而不是批评本身;这是关于你是如何乘传达这些理念去改变工程师的日程安排;这是关于你是怎么知道何时去推进“已经足够好”的内容并做得更好;这是关于你为何要先解决产品中所存在的问题再将其推向公众。

让我们在此清楚定义设计师这一角色——设计并不只是创造一些外表华丽的内容,设计应该是创造未来的愿景。如果公司的目标不是为了解决一些复杂且不确定的问题,或纠结于“优秀”的真正定义,那么设计师的存在便是为了设想,创造,并传达让人惊艳的新产品。

如果说设计师的任务是构想未来,那么初创公司便是去实现这些未来的正能量,这种合作关系也是推动设计师在初创公司更有效工作的动力。所以,如果你想创建一家受设计驱动的初创公司,请务必遵循这些要点。大胆地设计未来,并努力实现这些设计。

本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转载,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

What every designer working in a startup needs to know

By Elle Luna

At the core of any startup is a passion to satisfy unmet needs. At the core of a designer there’s a passion to craft a bold vision for the future. But being a designer and being a designer in a startup are two very different things. After working at IDEO for about five years, I took the leap into a startup. Here are the three most surprising things I’ve learned from the past year about design and the role a designer plays in a startup.

User research doesn’t produce user-centered design.

At IDEO, a team conducts “unfocus groups” where consumers were given a buffet of prototyping materials to build their perfect running shoe.

Traditional quantitative user research does not help you envision the future. As Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Using focus groups and surveys to measure and predict what consumers need and want are incremental at best because they’re focused on present realities.

User-centered design is something entirely different. It’s a way to run your company — with users at the center — where you uncover, understand and are inspired by people’s needs, wants, hopes, and aspirations; what they say, feel, do (and don’t do). So asking a focus group to imagine the future is akin to asking them to do the designer’s job themselves. It’s nonsensical.

Steve Jobs introduces the iMac, or “what [computers] will look like from today on.”

Steve Jobs was notorious for his belief that good design could create products that anticipate consumer needs. As he said, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” But Apple is a deeply user-centered company. Instead of relying on focus groups, they designed products they’d  want to use. Which is why, in 1998, they opted to put a lot of memory into the new iMac, to give it an optimal screen size, and to simplify the overall user experience. As Jobs explained at the time,”This has to be the computer that we want on our desks too.”

One way is to get your design team into the homes of people who would use your product, and let them experience these people’s lives first-hand. Your offering will look quite different when you begin to see the context that will exist around it in people’s lives. Another way is to randomly conduct “man on the street” style interviews where you show someone a low-fidelity prototype and get their feedback. These are fast and dirty — and really fun to do. A final way to better understand your customer is to host what IDEO calls a “Whine and Dine,”  where a focused conversation happens over food and drinks.

These methods aren’t about measuring, and they’re not about predicting. Rather, user-centered design is about starting with people — to uncover their unmet needs, aspirations and behaviors. And once you identify whom you’re serving and what they need, hold onto those insights as the sacred, core opportunities of your company.

Design and engineering don’t make great bedmates.

Hundreds of logo studies were done before converging on the final Mailbox identity.

The traits that make for a good engineering culture are rarely the same as those that make for a good design culture. Design teams thrive in the experimental, the quick and dirty, in taking leaps and being daring, and they aren’t afraid of failing as a means to learning. Engineering teams, on the other hand, thrive in understanding, in the elegant solutions that account for edge cases, in heads down and focussed spaces, and the engineers I know aren’t too keen on failures of any kind.

IDEO’s San Francisco offices have an open layout for cross-pollination of ideas through conversation.

During this past year I worked in an office that was modeled after IDEO — big communal tables, no walls, and lots of team space. You’d think this open format would foster discussion, keep the designers and engineers in lock-step and promote visibility across the company. But that just wasn’t the case. The designers were noisy, they liked their music at full volume, and they hashed through design reviews passionately. The engineers were cranking and found the noise and activity distracting.

So instead of trying to convince the engineers to be more like the designers, or for the designers to be more like the engineers, we went to Home Depot, bought some giant sheets of foamcore and built a wall. Suddenly, the engineers had a coding cave that was quiet and took over two-thirds of the office, while the designers had the other third of the space to pump their music and debate over button styles as loudly as they wanted.

The result? On the day-to-day level, people were suddenly excited for weekly meetings instead of being at one another’s throats. And at a deeper, cultural level, a respect began to emerge between the teams.

Embrace the fact that design and engineering cultures are different. Design is really well-suited to answer the “How might we?” questions, while engineering is really well-suited to consider all of the details that go into making a concept real. And if you want to build a world-class product, you have to surround these two unique cultures with the tools, space and support that will get them there. They’re complementary – you need both. It’s where 2 + 2 adds up to 5.

You can’t add back in design at the end.

Design thinking touches all aspects of your company.

A startup expresses the values of the founding team. Period.

If the founding team isn’t made up of designers or design-thinkers, design will have a hard time offering much more than window dressing. The founders represent the heart and soul of the company: What the founders burn for will be what the company burns for, and when a company is run by a team that loves product, the results are magical. Because a design-led startup is going to design not only their product, but also their culture. (It’s this mission that started The Designer Fund — a group solely dedicated to investing in designer founders.)

Dropbox’s product helps you upload and share your photos, documents and videos simply and easily.

Take Dropbox, for example. It has only three official designers and the founder, Drew Houston, is a self-professed software engineer. But the Dropbox team has obsessed over the design of their product: It is a wonderfully simple, easy-to-use, intuitive product that serves a clearly defined, core need. It is magical. And this is because — even though he doesn’t call himself a designer — Houston is a design-thinker, which is expressed through the entire product. Dropbox is clearly the result of design thinking operating at the core of the company. So for design to be effective in a startup, it has to be at the center of the organization.

But design isn’t just about product; design is a way of thinking about everything. It’s how you handle the unknowns when talking to investors; it’s how you approach ambiguity within your earliest ideas and explorations; it’s how you critique — not criticize; it’s how you talk through those ideas that could potentially alter your engineering schedule by months; it’s how you know when to keep pushing past “good enough” and on to great;  and it’s how you get from why you’re solving a problem to what you’re building and putting out into the world.

Let’s call a spade a spade here and reframe the role of the designer — design isn’t simply making things look pretty, design is about creating a vision for tomorrow. And it’s difficult — if not impossible — to dream, create and ship amazing new products when the foundation of the company isn’t set up to solve really complex problems, deal with uncertainty, and align on a definition of what “good” looks like.

Since the designer’s role is to envision tomorrow, and the startup exists to bring tomorrow into existence, that fundamental partnership is what’s really needed for a designer to effectively do their job in a startup. So if you’re interested in building a design-led startup, do it fully. Be bold in designing the future. And make that vision a reality.(source:gigaom)


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