Good book: Do you matter?

Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company by Robert Brunner, Stewart Emery, Russ Hall

I’ve been reading this book co-written by Robert Brunner, former director of Apple’s Industrial Design Group and principal at Pentagram, the globally renowned design firm. (and according to Valley Wag, helped design the Amazon Kindle) Designed by Pentagram, the book offers a nicely digestible account of design’s value to business success, particularly for business folks (execs, directors, managers, etc.) who may still be unconvinced of “pursuing good design” as a fundamental business mission/prerogative.

For designers like myself, I feel there’s really not much earth-shatteringly novel or mind-blowing–we’ve all heard these points before of course. Yet they bear repeating with refreshed examples, from Geico to Samsung to P&G and others, as Brunner, et al does in the text.

The vital takeaway is the point about designing for the “emotional connection”–ensuring that your product and/or service is conceived as a portal to a total, integrated, cohesive “customer experience supply chain” that is memorable and rewarding. While I wholeheartedly agree, personally I find that particular phrasing (“customer experience supply chain”) a bit awkward and Dilbert-esque. Yet I must admit that it strongly parallels what I’ve been advocating lately, for an “integrative aesthetic experience” where the core elements (like Dan Saffer’s touchpoints and service moments) resonate into a coherent whole–a true experience in the Deweyan sense.

Ultimately, it’s about delivering an experience that propels a customer’s sense of being alive, as the authors state in the concluding chapter. This of course is a deeply emotional, personal, and HUMAN aspect that number-crunching CEO’s often don’t grok well, but designers do! Personally it’s great to see someone talking about this in a design book aimed at business suits, directly reflecting the language of Joseph Campbell, which address profound social/humanistic issues beyond profits and sales…but influence such economic success metrics.

Below are some of the most memorable and noteworthy quotes from the text that I will certainly keep referring back to:

  • Effective design establishes the emotional relationship you develop with a brand through the total experience, to which a service or product provides a portal.
  • You matter to your customers only to the extent that you have become connected to their emotional needs and desires.
  • You don’t sacrifice the user experience for growth; you drive growth from the quality of the experience.
  • Design-driven companies don’t design to the way they manufacture (code); they manufacture (code) to the way they design.
  • Executing great design is everybody’s job, not just the designer’s.
  • Being design-driven is a process, not an event; unless you’re willing to make fundamental changes, you’ll go back to doing the same old thing.
  • If design resided in research alone, there would be more great design.

I have a (few) dream(s)…

Hope this doesn’t read like a “bucket list” (gulp!) but instead just a lifelong “to do list” as a designer, aside from the daily rigors of client projects, and so forth…

  1. Design my own font, Udanium Sans and Serif (in a family of weights, of course)
  2. Write a series of short books (a la Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity) on the profound topics of Strategy, Language, Innovation, Culture, and Experience, which would have the cute nickname SLICE :-)
  3. Author a best-selling memoir of my journey in Silicon Valley through Oracle, Adobe, Cisco, and other companies, and the lessons learned
  4. Illustrate a graphic novel or comic book issue (at least do the cover artwork)
  5. Do at least one of these photographic workshops, led by Santa Fe and/or National Geographic
  6. Have my own photography and art/illustration gallery downtown (or at least a temporary opening with nice wines and cheeses)
  7. Map out the entirety of design knowledge into a visually compelling diagram series, per Dick Buchanan’s landmark seminar at CMU
  8. Give the keynote address at a major design conference
  9. Design and grow a design curriculum/syllabus for a major university
  10. Take a class/workshop at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA)

The Gladwell “trilogy”

Whew, I just wrapped up Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, which completes an intellectually amusing trilogy of sorts bound by the common theme of observing ordinary phenomena to deduce obvious yet fascinating patterns to lead to massive gamechangers. As more of a quick note to myself, below is my own rundown of the core idea or “golden nugget” if you will of each of Gladwell’s bestselling books:

The Tipping Point: over time and through the interconnectedness of people, ideas, organizations, certain concepts primed per some moment in time/history/context become massively popular, spreading like viruses in epidemic fashion

Blink: through well experienced, judicious, and carefully honed sense of “thin slicing” of a situation, you can gain equal or more information and thus make accurate decisions, than via tedious, laborious extensive research studies and quantitative analyses

Outliers: genius is not just luck or self-made per the typical myth we tell ourselves, but is in fact ecological, or dependent upon some specific patterned history of events and contexts (social, economic, political, educational, etc.)

Great quotes from Ive and Jobs

I’ve recently been re-reading “Inside Steve’s Brain” which I had previously blogged about with great affection and enthusiasm–every designer and (more importantly) product manager, director, and executive should absorb its valuable lessons! Here are a few particular noteworthy passages:

“Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.”– S Jobs

** IMHO, that part about truly deeply madly understanding something is vital to ensuring that a designer is NOT treated as a lipstick artist but instead instrumental to defining and shaping the quality of experience, and must be respected as such from the beginning, not thrown in at the end of a clean-up phase prior to release.

“We have assembled a heavenly design team…By keeping the core team small and investing significantly in tools and process we can work with a level of collaboration that seems particularly rare. In fact, the memory of how we work will endure beyond the products of our work.“– J Ive

** I love this part about the shared social/cultural/behavioral memory of the organization outlasting the artifacts of the process and teamwork. Very tantalizing concept that few managers really get in large company environments, design-based or otherwise.

On the central task of a designer, Ive says the task is to

“solve incredibly complex problems and make their resolution appear inevitable and incredibly simple, so you have no sense how difficult this thing was.” Conversely, the designer fails if the design is too obvious, complicated, creating more problems, and calling attention to itself and distracting from the fluidity of the user’s experience/activity…

And on prototyping’s essential value to the design process, Ive continues:

“We make a lot of models and prototypes, and we go back and iterate. We strongly believe in prototyping and making things so you can pick them up and touch them. We make lots and lots of prototypes: the number solutions we make to get one solution is quite embarrassing, but it’s a healthy part of what we do.”

Codecamp’08 follow-up

A week ago today I gave my “stump speech” on UI Design Fundamentals, largely and loosely based upon my industry experience and class at SJSU this fall. It was a great success! Thanks to all those who attended and offered your questions & comments during and after the session.

I still need to get permissions to publish the presented content on this blog or my website, as they have client-related materials, etc. In the meantime, I have extensive UI-related resources linked here:

http://udanium.com/html/design_resources.html

Thanks again and more to posted soon…