I’m always looking for great presentations and examples of what design means. Today I discovered a presentation Rebekah Cox from Quora recently gave at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. There’s a short 5-minute video of the presentation on youtube (see below), but better still, the presentation was transcribed and posted with the slides on Quora. I’m quite impressed with both the definition and how it was applied to Quora. The presentation is succinct and most importantly, offers a brilliant case for the design process beginning at the outset of a product, where I believe it should. As Rebekah explains, since everyone has an intuitive definition of design, the first thing she did at Quora was to “create a simple definition of what design meant”. Which is: “Design is a set of decisions about a product. It’s not an interface or an aesthetic, it’s not a brand or a color. Design is the actual decisions.” I like that definition because it does suppose that design helps shape the early decisions, which is the interaction design, but also instead of design ‘editing’ a product when colouring it in, it builds the product before. This definition is not exactly radical, at least it shouldn’t be to most designers, but I just happen to like the way it’s packaged. Much better than most of my rants.

I’m also impressed that Quora has four designers for a company I’d read was still relatively small. That number shows an early investment in design. It’s not entirely about the head count, but the ratio within the whole company. According to this Quora page there are 22 employees (as of date of this post), and aside from the 4 product designers, there are 13 engineers and one product manager. That’s an amazing ratio I’ve never seen before. Kudos Quora.