Product Design Lessons From Smashing’s Workshop
Recently, I stepped in to host a Smashing Magazine workshop on product design, filling in for Vitaly Friedman. It was a welcome return to a discipline I practiced long ago, and the guest speakers—Chris Kolb, Kevin Hawkins, and Vicky Carmichael—provided plenty of practical insight into how teams handle research, requirements, and scaling usability efforts.
The full presentations are available on YouTube, with a follow-up discussion I moderated with Chris and Kevin after their talks.
- Chris Kolb: All Users Are Stupid
- Kevin Hawkins: Scaling International User Research
- Vicky Carmichael: Design By Doing
- Follow-up discussion with Chris and Kevin
Small Teams Stay Close to Customers
Vicky’s talk highlighted a key advantage of smaller organizations. With roughly 11 employees, her team has everyone interfacing directly with customers. That proximity means issues and requests are handled quickly, without layers of process in between.
Large Teams Must Fight Silos
For bigger teams, the risk is fragmentation. As teams grow, communication and collaboration tend to drop off, leading to a silo mentality. Kevin’s suggestions for countering that include shared team dashboards and making meeting artifacts available in multiple formats—such as AI-generated summaries, video recordings, and documented decisions—so the whole team stays aligned.
“Dumb” Users Often Lack Context, Not Intelligence
Chris’s talk reframed a common frustration: users doing seemingly irrational things are usually just operating without enough time or context. The fix isn’t to dismiss them, but to approach the problem from their bewildered perspective. Solving these “dumb” problems starts with understanding that constrained state of mind.
