Build a Design Culture
Top startups are now also looking for their designers to help build a company culture that values design. This means producing a well designed product, helping other employees understand and respect design, and can even extend to designing the physical office space. To build this culture designers must:
Be Collaborative and Inclusive
Though going off to a private space and designing a perfect solution is romantic and sometimes necessary it rarely raises the design IQ of an organization. To do this designers need to find opportunities to be collaborative and inclusive where possible.
One great example is a design team that printed up their design mocks and gave out chocolate in return for feedback. This approach ended up getting them insights from unexpected places like finance and legal, and got many people in the company behind what they were building.
Be a design evangelist
Great designers at top startups also do a great job of evangelizing design to help people understand how to work with design and the impact it design can have. At Coursera, the Director of Design uses “All Hands” meetings to talk about product design and what the design team is working on to the entire company. This has helped increase company understanding of how design helps the business and has increased the number of people that seek to collaborate with design as a strategic partner.
Be a design educator
Finally great designers educate others on design. At Facebook, Mark would often walk over to me and ask me to adjust spacing, margins, color, etc. while I was designing. Instead of turning inward and getting frustrated I would use these opportunities to educate him on design and why I made specific decisions. The result has been that Mark’s design IQ is now extremely high and it’s because many designers used interactions with him as design education opportunities.
Treat Prototyping as Design
As more design moves to mobile devices designers must think along a time dimension. This means photoshop or sketch alone won’t produce the deliverables you need to communicate the work. In this new reality, prototyping is designing.