Jon Kolko

"A new way to create-and then disrupt Industry disruption is no longer isolated to a unique product or service. Today's consumer needs engagement in order to be swayed to interact, connect, and buy your next offering. Achieve this and you'll achieve success. Sharp and refreshing, design insider and expert Jon Kolko offers a new view and usable process for conceiving and building powerful, emotionally resonant new products in this new book. In Well-Designed, Kolko-VP at MyEdu and Founder and Director of the Austin Center for Design--shows how deep, meaningful engagement happens when products and services are delivered in an authentic way, when consumers see them less like manufactured artifacts and more like good friends. The key is empathy-driven design thinking, using a process of storytelling and iteration, with results that provoke emotion, change behavior, and create deep engagement. Kolko, who has been engaged in this process of design for more than 15 years, now shares a concrete set of steps for identifying lucrative opportunities, designing for innovation, and producing products that have deep, meaningful emotional engagement. By following this process, readers will learn how to raise the role of design to a strategic competency"--

How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

Well-designed

On users not caring about siloed apps, but about performing actions

PG Gonni

In these cases, part of achieving the goal is about sending an email. Another part is about looking at a calendar. Another part is about finding the address of a coffee shop, and still another is about finding driving directions to that location. These activities stretch across products. The arbitrary confines of Google's organizational structure should have little bearing on a person's ability to achieve his goal with ease.

Design takes an optimistic stance about the future by assuming that there are infinite ways to work to improve situations.

[Industry leaders] have the predisposition and the capacity to hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they're able to creatively resolve the tension between those two ideas by generating a new one that contains elements of the others but is superior to both.

The best way to learn about product development, to learn the difference between design and product management, is to start something and do everything yourself. You'll intimately understand the tensions between the creative side and the 'ship it side. At some point, you have to converge, stop ideating, and get to the point where you can produce it, ship it, code it, and

Thank goodness we left behind the notion that in the world of technology, you're supposed to do stuff in a scalable way. We tried that, in the early days, and failed miserably. Scaling is the wrong approach when looking for product-market fit. You have no scale to solve for when you are starting something. So why optimize for that?

“Anything that will be a billion dollar industry in 10 years is already 10 years old. If you study history, almost no one invented anything."

Some diagrams are presentation artifacts, used to rationalize your ideas to other people. Think of these, instead, as working artifacts. The purpose in creating them is to help you consider and establish strategy. Counterintuitively, once the artifacts have been made, they lose their value because they've already accomplished their goal: of informing your broad trajectory.

An exercise to identify weaknesses in GTM strategy. Imagining a competitor to whom you lose miserably

You can get ahead, however, by presuming that a competitor will introduce a new product into the market. In this scenario, imagine that your product loses miserably to that new product.

Some [products] get big as people store more data in them; this is called progressive commitment. You put more data in the system and you become more and more committed to the system over time. It gets harder and harder to leave that service. Evernote or Dropbox are great examples.

Each statement is presented as a fact, but each is actually an inference. Each statement may be factually wrong, so using insights will introduce risk into your process, but this risk has its reward. Insights are the source of innovation: insights are gold.

Well-designed quotes

Join the club