Process is important, yes, but this statement is ridiculous. Good design is absolutely, 100%, from beginning to end, all about the final product. The only people to whom your design process matters is you and your collaborators.

One might argue that this is one of the key distinctions between art (an area in which process can be equally, if not significantly more, important that product) and design.

I think Process > Product also. This is an interesting debate because positioning them as a binary implies you must choose only one., when in reality their relationship is not like that.

Everyone wants a good product. No denying that. Considering all the ways you design/develop, it's kind of overwhelming and unpredictable. Good process is a way to make the path towards a good product more predictable and repeatable. Essentially if you care about making a good product you should also care a lot about process.

For what it's worth, I focus entirely on product and not at all on process.

I'll let you judge for yourself whether that's been a mistake ;)

For me it's really binary. "Was a good end result created" that's all I care about and aim for.

I don't agree with this at all. Good design is most certainly about the final product. If you have a shitty final product, nobody cares about the process you used to get there.

"A short time interval between revisions is more important than whether you will complete a project by its deadline." Unless you work at a startup with limited funding. Deadlines are not suggestions.

"Delay decisions until the moment they must be made." Not sure how this is helpful. If you rapidly explore options and find what you think works best, it allows you to move onto other decisions more quickly, and ultimately explore more options. Sometimes you'll make the wrong decision, but rapidly making choices that you think are the best will allow you to find that out more quickly and make changes. This is another thing you learn from working at a startup with limited funding.

I'm really iffy on the whole "Delay decisions until the moment they must be made" bit. In Marc's case, it worked because of the manager and the team that was built up.

There's also a lot to be said about making choices early and going forward. Like that recent article someone posted here about building that balls IOS game... it's the details that are the difference... and also the massive time-suck.

To me, it's the details in something that makes it successful. You can stress about a core layout for ages... second guess yourself for weeks on end with edge cases and input from the CEO's wife. In the end though, if you draw the hard lines early and march forward... it can give you a much better chance to really put those details in. The "moments" of delight that users and designers go "gaga" about.

I've worked with a lot of amazing designers that get decision paralysis hardcore. I also think a lot of designer and developers have a massive fear of redoing work - tossing away work and iterating on what worked and what didn't. In today's digital world... assumption can carry far too much risk than reward. Digital is not permanent... it's OK to spend 2-3 months building something and then scrapping half of it to have a much improved product a few months after that. The key IMHO is to get it out there and learn.

I feel that if you're playing the short game, spending as much time as you can on something can get you an amazing result, but in the long run... a company willing to push something 80% as nice as you, but iterate 3X faster than you will rather quickly blow by you - not just in terms of UX, but also in terms of details.

**EDIT/COMMENT: And holy shit my last paragraph is the longest run-on sentence EVER. Sorry about that! LOL.

Good design solves problems.

Great article, really inspiring. I already read Marc’s article and will hope to incorporate all of this into my process. I thought the no deadline approach was interesting because I think it’s also well understood a deadline can also help the creation of something too. But that anxiousness is definitely a factor, and if you remove that I know I do better work.

The John Cleese video seemed to be down for me, anyone else?

I agree that process is important, but the opening statement that it should somehow be impossible to luck into creating something well designed without a particularly good process is just not true.