Design for Reality

His book addresses the type of thinking that distracts us from designing a product for a small
audience, which helps you and another five people instead of 100 million faceless people who
you don’t know personally.
Designing with your ego creates a product that is diluted, unfocused, and just bland. Consider
these well-known products that didn’t give into big thinking in the beginning.
Facebook was designed first for people at Harvard, not for a billion people around the world. If
Mark Zuckerberg designed Facebook for a billion people on day one, it would have failed.
Facebook was online for two years before opening itself up to the general public.
Uber was originally a black car service in San Francisco. Today, Uber has evolved from a local
black car service, to a global ridesharing app, and now, to a service for lifestyle and logistics. In
2008, this wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone.
Flickr began as a photo-sharing feature within an online game. Only after the product had been
perfected did the team realize that it could be applied more broadly. In 2005, Flickr was
acquired by Yahoo. Today, it has 51 million registered users worldwide.
“Ego is the enemy of what you want and of what you have: Of mastering a craft. Of real creative
insight. Of working well with others. Of building loyalty and support. Of longevity. Of repeating
and retaining your success. It repulses advantages and opportunities. It’s a magnet for enemies
and errors. It is Scylla and Charybdis.”― Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Get Out of Your Head!
Designers all have a tendency to turn their life into a story. We write a fantastic narrative of our
past with ourselves at the center – I helped design billion dollar companies or I worked for
[insert massive startup here] – and this distracts us from designing for reality.
We often produce concept work to develop or show off our abilities as designers.
What I’m suggesting is to not let your ego guide you toward producing a concept for another
billion-dollar startup. These companies became the way they are over long periods of
refinement and being patient. Therefore we can only possibly provide an undeveloped opinion
on redesigning their product.