More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 10 - July 29, 2018
Squeezing greater efficiency has run its course, and design’s generative qualities are seen as a means to realize new business value.
the core opportunity for design is to inject humanism into work.
“Design is the rendering of intent.”
“The designer imagines an outcome and puts forth activities to make that outcome real.”[
the opportunity for design is to make every part of that service experience more intentional.
to a customer, marketing and product are simply points along the same journey,
puts forth an idea that is then taken as the solution, and teams just march toward its implementation. The
An architect would never propose a building design without presenting stakeholders a scale model;
Low-fidelity sketches quickly make apparent shortcomings in an incoherent or incomplete strategy.
By remaining in abstraction as long as possible, hard decisions do not have to be made.
A shortcoming of the Double Diamond diagram is that it suggests that for every act of definition, there is an act of execution. In fact, after the creation of a plan, execution occurs iteratively, knocking down elements of the roadmap with each pass
The reality of contemporary product and service delivery is a messy one, and requires the productive tension between business, technology, and design.
it has become clear that the frontier for design is to play a role not only in every stage of development from idea to final offering, but to be woven into every aspect of the service experience from marketing to product to support.
If a single team is labeled as the primary keeper of the user experience, that absolves other departments from concerning themselves with it. User experience must be everyone’s responsibility.
to get the most out of a team requires sensitive management, visionary leadership, and well-run operations.
most people in an organization have never worked with a truly effective design team,
Leaders have an intimate understanding of how the team should work, make decisions that benefit the team, and have the respect of the team’s members.
A design team needs to be in charge of its own destiny, and this requires focused leadership with autonomy and executive access.
this design leader’s primary responsibilities will prove organizational, working with other executives to clear the path for design, and serving as a manager, mentor, team builder, and operator for the team itself, creating both a figurative and literal space where design can thrive.
one person focused on creative matters, and the other on operational.
In filmmaking, there is the Director and the Producer.
designers develop empathy for their users, which in turns leads them to design systems that have real impact, and avoid solutions that will be rejected by the intended audience.
Designers need to understand how their work contributes to business success.
Savvy design leaders embrace business value, realizing it can serve as a powerful input into the design process.
“Marketing” and “product” experiences are simply milestones on the same customer journey.
They need to facilitate the creative output of others throughout the organization, tapping into a resource often left dormant.
For the team to deliver to its potential, it must operate across a range not only of skills, but of conceptual scale, from the “big picture” down to the pixel and pica.
Design work is more than just what people see — design effort and artifacts inform product and service experiences at all levels of scale[
A design organization is ultimately judged by the quality of its output. What’s tricky is that there’s no universal definition of design quality.
To overcome this, the design organization must be empowered to define quality standards for their team and their organization. Those standards then must be externalized so that others know what is being upheld.
are asked to do too many things with too few people in too little time.
design organization is only as good as what it delivers, and if it is producing crap because it’s trying to do too many things, then the rest of the organization will associate design with crap.
Design leaders need to wield the power of “No.” Design work should only be done when adequately prioritized and staffed, and when there is time to develop quality solutions.
Many design organizations rely on process as a proxy for quality. This is a false connection. Critical thinking is essential for delivering great work, and an over-adherence to a methodology leads to teams making unthinking decisions.
Design problems vary, and design teams should be familiar with a range of approaches and methods to solve them appropriately.
when any process becomes an assumption or accepted dogma, it becomes a crutch that replaces critical thinking.
Designers can have trouble realizing that delivery is just part of an ongoing process.
continuous delivery should not be an excuse to ship bad stuff, with the notion of fixing it later.
striking the right balance between quality and delivery is a matter of judgment.
Without sound management practices, a design team turns into a hornet’s nest of disillusionment, putting the quality of the team’s output in jeopardy, and risking retention.
Job titles imply equivalence and interchangeability for anyone with the same title.
Seniority levels are seen as guidelines, not strict containers.
Managers must understand how team members want to evolve — do they want to deepen their craft, cross-train into other skills, learn how to lead? — and find ways to support them.
limiting exploration by aligning on solutions too early in the process.
Approaching a problem from a range of angles reveals solutions that may otherwise remain hidden.
Every member of the team must demonstrate respect to every other member, or the openness required for successful collaboration will not emerge.
frank and candid critique and feedback are essential for upholding the quality standards. Greatness comes from the tension and collision of different perspectives
Design teams that favor politeness over candor will rarely produce great work.
Great design work takes space — places to collaborate, whiteboards for sketching and ideation, walls to show work. And those spaces should be permanent, places where the team works and sees their work all around them.
A centralized team establishes design guidelines, and enforces them through the projects they take on.
