Design as a Competitive Advantage

Imagine you are building a new product, say a Death Star, to solve a particularly pesky problem: getting rid of Rebel scum. You don’t much care what it looks like or how efficiently it is designed, so it is treated as an engineering problem. In the rush to market, it ships with a critical flaw, like an exhaust port leading directly to the core.

In this talk from Mind the Product 2013, Andy Budd, a founding partner at the UX consultancy Clearleft and curator of dConstruct, takes on the common belief that technology is at the core of successful products and that design plays second fiddle. He argues that design is the true competitive advantage. It is not just about aesthetics, which will only get you so far: good design is about how something behaves when it is in use.