Design for Startups: What’s the Difference? As you may have gleaned from the information above, design for startups is quite different from design for established companies. As a designer, you must understand these differences to create a product that will fit your target audience.
The first key point is that in a startup, you don’t have the luxury of time. You can’t spend months on making small adjustments to your design – instead, you should rapidly create it, test your assumptions, and, once you receive feedback, incorporate it into your prototype.
Of course, aesthetics is important-too. But in the startup design, the main aim of your product is to solve a problem. A good design should just facilitate the solution of this problem.
Finally, in the startup design, everything that matters is how your users feel about your product. You need to adapt to their wishes and respond to their reactions.
The last but surely not the least important feature of startup design is the idea of growth. Startups want to grow; your design must grow with them.
The final point to mention in the context of startup design is that designing is not a one-man show. As a startup designer, you will need to communicate with developers, project managers, and different experts in order to create a product that will satisfy your audience.
Designing for startups is a specific combination of creativity, technical skills and understanding of how to run a business, which also includes the opportunity to work fast, make decisions based on extremely limited information and a very close and active collaboration with all team members. By learning and acknowledging the main differences between startup design and regular one, any designer can change the approach to their work and grow the startup in the dynamic, quick-moving and innovational world in which the cut rig is valued more than excellence.
