This link has been bookmarked by 36 people . It was first bookmarked on 18 Feb 2008, by steve t.
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23 May 11
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31 Jan 10
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12 Jan 10
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they overestimate the importance of their own skills. Engineers think that success is all about fancy technology and complex engineering (hello Google). Designers think that success is all about beautiful design. MBAs think that success is all about knowing the right people, or spreadsheets, or something.
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arrogant and overconfident
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you only need enough technology to make the product work. Any more and you probably have the wrong priorities.
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they have enough design (or the right design) to work for their users.
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So what's the right attitude? Humility. It doesn't matter how smart and successful and qualified you are, you simply don't know what you're doing. The good news is that nobody else does either, though some are foolish enough to think that they do (and that's why you can beat them).
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Pay attention. Notice which things are working and which aren't. Experiment and iterate. Question your assumptions. Remember that you are wrong about a lot of things. Watch for the signals. Lose your technical and design snobbery. Whatever works, works.
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MySpace is a great example of this. I'm pretty sure that their custom profile page layouts were an accident. They didn't know enough to properly escape the text that people put on their profiles, and that allowed their users to start including arbitrary html and css in their pages. This is a common bug, and most people would have fixed the bug and that would have been the end of it (really great engineers wouldn't have had the bug in the first place). But they did something smarter. They noticed that the feature was popular and found a way to preserve it. The result is mostly ugly, but it's extremely popular.
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it's important to understand that "accidental" isn't the same as "random"
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11 Jan 10
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What is the humble approach to product design? Pay attention. Notice which things are working and which aren't. Experiment and iterate. Question your assumptions. Remember that you are wrong about a lot of things. Watch for the signals. Lose your technical and design snobbery. Whatever works, works.
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24 Apr 08
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You can take the smartest, most experienced, most connected, most brilliant people in the world and have them build the most stunningly designed and technically advanced product in the world, but if people don't want it, then you will fail. This is roughly what happened with the Segway, for example.
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Even if you aren't the smartest person around, and your product is kind of ugly and broken, you can still be very successful, if you just build the right product. YouTube and MySpace are both fine examples of this.
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When Google acquired YouTube, many people inside the company were flabbergasted, "But they have no technology!?" They didn't understand that you only need enough technology to make the product work. Any more and you probably have the wrong priorities.
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So what's the right attitude? Humility. It doesn't matter how smart and successful and qualified you are, you simply don't know what you're doing. The good news is that nobody else does either, though some are foolish enough to think that they do (and that's why you can beat them).
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What is the humble approach to product design? Pay attention. Notice which things are working and which aren't. Experiment and iterate. Question your assumptions. Remember that you are wrong about a lot of things. Watch for the signals. Lose your technical and design snobbery. Whatever works, works.
MySpace is a great example of this. -
I wrote the first version of Gmail in one day. It was not very impressive. All I did was stuff my own email into the Google Groups (Usenet) indexing engine. I sent it out to a few people for feedback, and they said that it was somewhat useful, but it would be better if it searched over their email instead of mine. That was version two. After I released that people started wanting the ability to respond to email as well. That was version three. That process went on for a couple of years inside of Google before we released to the world.
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27 Feb 08
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26 Feb 08
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21 Feb 08
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19 Feb 08
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rampion"So what's the right attitude? Humility. It doesn't matter how smart and successful and qualified you are, you simply don't know what you're doing."
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Don FaulknerYou can take the smartest, most experienced, most connected, most brilliant people in the world and have them build the most stunningly designed and technically advanced product in the world, but if people don't want it, then you will fail.
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18 Feb 08
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Martin Lindnerthe m,an who wrote Google Mail: on quick & dirty iterations, accidental inventions, just havinbg *enough* technology and design to get something to work
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17 Feb 08
Page Comments
How to decide what to build instead of HOW to build it....that is a idea that I think would be important to explore...
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