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?


More specifically...


Why didn’t Intuit build Mint?


Why didn’t Google build Sparrow?


Organizational differences and people


What’s different about the people?


They’re not people, they’re X-Men.


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.


Am I mutant or human?


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...)


Oh snap. I’m a human.*

• *unless I do 3 or more of the things on the previous slide. Then I’m a mutant!


To mutants, these aren’t functional roles.

• They are disciplines.

• Designers do most, if not all of them.


In fact, they do more of just about everything.


mutants do human factors work


mutants do interaction design


mutants do visual design


what did he just say?


(It doesn’t matter than you’re not “that kind of


Why visual design?


How it looks vs how it works is a false

dichotomy


really.


Tesla vs Chevy Volt


Jura vs Keurig


Dyson vs everyone else


AirBnB vs Couchsurfing


Etsy vs Ebay


How it looks informs how it works


mutants write code


WTF did he just say?


Why should designers write code?


A craftsperson understands her

medium


Imagine a sculptor who had never chiseled

stone


Imagine a landscape architect who had

never planted a garden, or studied erosion


Imagine a real estate developer who had

never pounded a nail or studied building code


A printer who had never made paper, or


And they simply hand over a spec for

someone else to make


Crazy right?


But this is what we do


“These people don’t really exist though...”


But they do.


Ben Silbermann

• Designer

• Developer

• Business/product guy

• Pinterest cofounder (on to new project)

• 19 years old


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


Everyone future designer under the age

of 12


So mutate yourself


But mutants on their own weren’t X-Men.


They were often maligned, outsiders,

prey.


Until they found Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.


This was a special place.


Computer science, history, combat...


These new types of designers, these

mutants, need the right environment too.


Most Big Co’s...

• Slow

• Deep specialization

• Segregated groups


Startups are different


Speed is king

• no one waits for a spec to write code

• no one waits for design mocks either, or they generally shouldn’t


Small, cross disciplinary teams


Environment

• open spaces

• everything is temporal


Designers embedded with developers, side by

side


Designers implementing their own

work


X-Men.


uh, cool... so now what?


become a mutant


then mutate your organization

• Embed yourself with developers

• Provide value to the implementation teams

• Seek open spaces

• Throw out the spec


What if my company won’t change?


The X-Men didn’t have it easy either.


Until they found Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters


Go find your own. It’s out there.


Godspeed, mutants.
