Bill Buxton on How to Be a Good Designer

Bill Buxton (www.billbuxton.com) of Microsoft Research – a pioneer in interface design – visited my User Interface Design & Development class this Tuesday. Bill spent most of the hour and a half discussing the role of design in Apple’s success. He identified 3 key areas that a designer must analyze when considering a company like Apple: marketing, design, and business creativity. For design success, a company must cater to each of these areas. To make this post easier to digest, I’ll outline his lecture with key phrases that made an impact on me.

- It doesn’t matter if you have a great design team, if you don’t have the business structure to enable you to do what you do.

- To be a designer, you’ve got to be a collector. Get a good notebook and start collecting.

- You’ve got to prepare for success as well as failure, high as well as low demand (e.g. Nintendo Wii).

- Feed high end to set aspirations, then let it trickle down (e.g. Apple iPod).

- Creativity is understanding how to learn from others, and making it your own.

- Stories are the most important form of viral marketing.

- If it’s free, it’s got to be perfect. Easy come, easy go.

- Surround yourself with a community of people who continually piss you off because of their insight, and try to piss them off likewise.

- If you want to make change, you have to have access to the power hub of the organization.

- Design is choice.

- Design is multiples. Don’t offer less than 5 equally valid options whenever you are critically analyzing a design. This promotes true criticism as well as creativity. Constant criticism is important for good design. “Design is like Swiss cheese – you’ve got to leave enough holes for the imagination.”

- The biggest problem is not the design of one product, but how the products work together.