BUILDING PRODUCTS THAT PEOPLE LOVE REQUIRES A DESIGN-CENTERED APPROACH.
Great products start with design, and design begins with the User.
We've all experienced lousy products:
Applications that aren't intuitive, so we uninstall or stop using them
Product assembly instructions that are difficult to navigate
Chairs that look sleek but are crazy uncomfortable to sit on
Bad products are often the result of poor design: failure to understand a user's intuitive and unspoken wants and needs.
Products should make someone's experience more efficient, enriching, or entertaining. And to arrive there, design leads the way.
A favorite quote from Steve Jobs: "Start with the User or customer's experience and work backward to the technology."
A design-first approach is not only a philosophy. It's an efficient business strategy that lends to a better product. And when all startup team members or leaders across departments at fortune 500 corporations align on design-centric thinking, it helps everyone understand what matters first!
Practical benefits of starting with design = quicker and less costly to achieve market fit.
Design thinking acknowledges that there is more than one way for a product to solve a problem.
Anyone that touches, impacts, or makes decisions about the product is a design thinker to varying degrees – and that's nearly everyone in a startup or every department head in a large corporation.
At my former system design and engineering company - NicheeLabs - no matter what "role" or "title" someone had, everyone involved valued a design-led approach and was sincerely obsessed with understanding and placing the User at the center.