I've long believed that if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've released too late.
It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.
What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.
I don't think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you're willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn't work. If you're going to invent, it means you're going to experiment, and if you're going to experiment, you're going to fail, and if you're going to fail, you have to think long term.
As I get older I find myself thinking about stories more and more before I work so that by the time I eventually sit down to write them, I know more or less how it's going to look, start or feel. Once I do actually set pencil to paper, though, everything changes and I end up erasing, redrawing and rewriting more than I keep. Once a picture is on the page I think of about ten things that never would have occurred to me otherwise. Then when I think of the strip at other odd times during the day, it's a completely different thing than it was before I started.
You can polish and iterate and double down on what the magic was. You can make a much better thing. A much cleaner thing, a much more solid thing. And that's what 'Borderlands 2' is to 'Borderlands.'
My sweet spot is figuring out how to make a product that people love and how to refine it to make them love it more. All the rest is business noise.
We do not focus test our games and never had. People ask why we don't, and I say, 'I have so many opinions in this studio, I don't need anymore!' We really debate everything - and it's a good debate. That's why the games turn out well: it's not me - it's not this guy - it's the collective. Together, we figure out what we want.
Here's the thing about Apple, we complain and they give us more battery life. We complain and they'll give us more stuff. Everything's beta right now. Everything's experimental. They really don't know what people want.
In the case of 'Fish,' I did the writing, design, and code all at the same time, so the form and the content were fused together. I'd change some words, get an idea, change some code, see if it worked, change more words, and so on.
Design principle: Take things away until the design breaks, then put that last thing back in.
The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.
Early in my career, I was involved with engineer-led projects, where designers came in late in the game and were expected to put lipstick on an existing code base. This almost never works.
The Googly thing is to launch products early on Google Labs and then iterate, learning what the market wants - and making it great. The beauty of experimenting in this way is that you never get too far from what the market wants. The market pulls you back.
Revolutionary products don't fail because they are shipped too early. They fail because they aren't revised fast enough.
Get your product into users' hands as quickly as possible and incorporate the crowd's feedback to iterate. Your customers will provide the data you need to chart the best course for your company and bury any competitor that goes it alone.
I'm experimenting in public. At the design grad schools, these are people sitting around in groups, putting their work on a wall, analyzing it and putting it back in a drawer. I think there's little risk in that.
A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.
The best kind of design isn't necessarily an object, a space, or a structure: it's a process- dynamic and adaptable.
Every human creative endeavor is subject to mathematical law that you’re not always going to be right all the time.
How good the design is doesn't matter near as much as whether the design is getting better or worse. If it is getting better, day by day, I can live with it forever. If it is getting worse, I will die.
The design process is about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers.
Our main funders... a lot of them are entrepreneurs and technologists themselves as well and familiar with iterative development processes.
We built the iPod in weeks. It had to be what I thought it was going to be because there wasn't time for endless refinements.
We don't do focus groups - that is the job of the designer. It's unfair to ask people who don't have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design.
