Over the course of my career, I've found the following tenants are critical to successfully creating a product.

1. 18 things I’ve
learned about
Design
Thoughts from a recovering design lead
Will Tschumy
1

2. 1. Wireframes are (usually) pretty but useless.
At least as a tool for developing a design. Illustrator and Visio /
OmniGraffle are fun, but you can indulge your info-graphic itch
elsewhere. Wireframes are important for documentation, but don’t
get that confused with the process of developing your design

3. 2. Understand your users; Understand their
context; Understand their goals.
If you can’t define what makes your user happy, and what will make
them tell their friends “you’ve got to try this,” you don’t know
enough. If you don’t know where they’ll be using your product or
service, you don’t know enough. See a pattern?

4. 3. Process is for solving problems predictably, not
checking boxes.
The point of any process is predictable execution – not checking off
elements of a list. There’s a phrase I’m fond of “have as little process
as possible, but as much is as necessary.”
Truer words were never spoken. This means a couple things: First, if
you’re part of a project with lots of people, or many moving parts,
some process is inevitable, if for no other reason than there’s a need
for predictability.
For small teams that are in close communication, you can skip some
steps. NB: skipping steps introduces project risk, so you need to be
careful, and experienced enough to know if it’s an acceptable risk!

5. 4. Make a decision. Eliminate unnecessary
choices.
Solving problems (Design) is about making decisions. If you’re not
doing that, you’re pushing that complexity onto your user. At best,
you’re annoying your user by making him / her answer something
s/he thinks is extraneous. At worst, you’re confusing and instilling a
lack of confidence in your user. If you’re really having trouble
making a decision, try using a a different frame to evaluate the
question from. Always remember #2.

6. 5. You aren’t the center of your user’s world. We
live in a low-attention (and often low-information) world. It’s likely
that you don’t have your user’s full attention, or at rate, not for very
long – design for this.

7. 6. If you’re not prototyping, you’re doing it
wrong.
See #1

8. 7. Be polite and respectful, but be smart about it.
This doesn’t mean asking permission for each step of a process. Be
careful of intrusiveness.
See #4 and #5

9. 8. Understand what you’re trying to
accomplish.
I call this a “Shared Thesis” – some have also called it Tenant-driven
design, or a “best at” statement. This is the single representation,
across the project team, of why you’re doing the
project. Everything you do should roll back to this statement.

10. 9. Transitions and motion are just as important as
screens and end states.
Don’t skimp on these.
See #1 and #6.

11. 10. Design isn’t just the product, but the sum
of all the interactions your user has with
the product
This means thinking super carefully about the entire customer
experience lifecycle, form the first interaction through to the point
that your users are (hopefully) telling their friends

12. 11. Satisfaction is nice, but Advocacy is the
goal.
Satisfaction is no indicator of loyalty to a product – advocacy,
however is. Think about it: would you be willing to recommend
(advocate) a product to your friends or family if you didn’t really
love it?

13. 12. Blank sheets of paper are traps.
Design without constraints isn’t really design – it may be fun, and it
may be a useful ideation exercise, but it doesn’t really do much to
solve a problem.
Remember your solution is always bounded by three questions: 1)
what’s desirable to users; 2) what’s viable in the market; and 3)
what’s possible with the technology.

14. 13. Inspiration comes from lots of different
places.
Parallel thinking, looking for patterns in related fields, is an
important tool for creative problem solving. Don’t for get this. If all
else fails, don’t forget the old adage from Picasso: Good artists
copy; Great artists steal.

15. 14. Tradition and inertia are bad reasons for
not doing something.
Orthodoxy, tradition, and inertia all represent potential blind spots
for your design solution. These can obscure the root cause of the
problem you’re trying to solve. You won’t always be able to change
the root cause, but knowing about it is a lot better than not!

16. 15. Designing for touch is more than just touch
target size.
This is really a presentation on its own. Touch interfaces, NUI’s
(natural user interfaces) – are paced differently than mouse-driven /
GUI experiences. There’s a symmetry between the resolution of
input and the density of experience consumption – because touch
input tends to be less precise, the density of experience tends to be
lower. Focusing on what’s important in that context is the core
product design decision.

17. 16. Organizational and team design is as
interesting and important as Product or Service
Design
The way that you organize your team to build, maintain and extend
your product or service needs to be approached with the same
care that you approach the development of the product or service

18. 17. Design, as a term, has been so overused, co-
opted, and applied to everything that it’s
virtually meaningless
Your team needs to have a commonly understood definition of
what you mean by design, and more importantly where and how in
the product development process it’s involved (hint: it’s almost
everywhere)

19. 17. So what does Design mean?
Design is a process of conscious balancing of constraints to meet or
exceed an explicitly defined goal or set of criteria. IxD, Visual
Design, IA, Motion Design are all examples of this process in action
– be careful not to equate specific practices with the overall process

20. 18. Product experiences are the most tangible
expression of your brand voice
The experience the product, along with getting to your product, is
the single best indicator

21. Thank
YouWill Tschumy
Director, Design & Quality Lead USDX
William.Tschumy@Microsoft.com