Art, music, writing or product design all follow the same creative process. If you are designing visual experiences, listening experiences, reading experience or technology experiences, the process is the same.
In Glenn Reid blog, What it’s Really Like Working with Steve Jobs, he explains that:
“Iteration. It’s the key to design, really. Just keep improving it until you have to ship it… It is a process which requires understanding the parameters, the goals, and the gives and takes. Stretch what’s possible, use technologies that are good, rein it in when the time comes, polish it and ship it.”
Design is a collaborative process. Almost everyone who ever design anything great, worked with a team or bounce ideas off someone else. Glenn explains what the process was like at Apple with Steve Jobs:
“… when I worked with Steve on product design, there was kind of an approach we took, unconsciously, which I characterize in my mind as a ‘cauldron’. There might be 3 or 4 or even 10 of us in the room, looking at, say, an iteration of iPhoto. Ideas would come forth, suggestions, observations, whatever. We would ‘throw them into the cauldron’, and stir it, and soon nobody remembered exactly whose ideas were which. This let us make a great soup, a great potion, without worrying about who had what idea… If an idea was good, we’d all eventually agree on it, and if it was bad, it just kind of sank to the bottom of the pot. We didn’t really remember whose ideas were which — it just didn’t matter.”
In The Customer Experience Revolution, Larry Tesler, discusses what it was like working directly with Steve Jobs, too:
“You could show him that X was a better design than Y and despite all of the issues that people would come back to you with about schedules and engineering limitations and prices and whatever, he would just cut through it and make a decision, taking into account the users’ experience more than anything.”
Great designs come from a collaborative, iterative process… and great leaders understand its importance to the profitability of their companies and how they can change markets and peoples lives forever.