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GEARÓID O’ROURKE, STARTUP DESIGNER 7 STEPS TO GREAT STARTUP DESIGN

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GEARÓID [GAH—ROAD] @OROURKEDESIGN

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IT’S NOT MAGIC, RESEARCH IT. 01.

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• Design needs good inputs to have good outputs. • Research should be the first step of your design process.

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• Understand the problem you are trying to solve, the ‘who’ you are trying to solve it for and what "solved" looks like.

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• Talk to potential users. • Determine their needs, the strengths of those needs and how they are currently attempting to address them.

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• Understand the job to be done by the software. What are your users hiring it to do?

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IT'S BETTER TOGETHER. 02.

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• Design is a team responsibility and a team effort. • Kill “over the wall” thinking.

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• Sketch together, do it often and do it early. • Pair up your designers and your engineers. Physically sit them next to each other.

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BUILD LESS, BUILD BETTER 03.

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• Build less features. Say no more often. • Build too much and it will all be half-a***d and poorly made.

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• We all agreed on MVP... right? • MVP ≠ poorly designed. • Poorly designed = no learnings.

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IT’S NOT MAGIC, TEST IT OUT. 04.

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• Great designers love data and love feedback. • How can you test design?

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• Design is about effectiveness, not prettiness. • Don’t test looks. Do test functionality, implementation and success against a metric.

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• Qualitative • Interviews, card sorting, guided user testing

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• Quantitative • Click test, A/B tests, heat maps, usage stats

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IT’S FRACTAL, SO ‘LIVE IT’. 05.

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• Design is fractal. Good design, or bad, exists at every zoom level. • Design that's just concerned with the surface will feel fake.

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• Do you send crappy ‘system’ emails to users? Is your error message text good? Do you provide a good built environment to your team?

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BELIEVE THAT IT'S WORTH IT. 06.

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• Any CEOs or founders or managers in the room? • Achieving great design is greatly influenced by having a great design culture.

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• Design is not fluffy. It's not a nice to have. It's not what comes ‘after’. • Design can be your biggest competitive advantage.

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INVEST IN GREAT PEOPLE. 07.

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• Might seem obvious, but hire a great designer. • Hire one early. Spend money on getting them.

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• Understand the difference between an experience focused designer and a "stylist". • Get an experience focused designer early on.

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IT’S NOT MAGIC, RESEARCH IT. 01.

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IT'S BETTER TOGETHER. 02.

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BUILD LESS, BUILD BETTER 03.

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IT’S NOT MAGIC, TEST IT OUT. 04.

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IT’S FRACTAL, SO ‘LIVE IT’. 05.

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BELIEVE THAT IT'S WORTH IT. 06.

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INVEST IN GREAT PEOPLE. 07.

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Follow up @ @orourkedesign [email protected]