I’ve never worked at Apple and I don’t know the culture, but it is said that Steve Jobs doesn’t come up with the ideas, he just filters them. The Wall Street Journal describes him as “like an editor in chief” over product design.

This resonates with me because the product design disasters I can think of are largely caused by one or more of the following three forces:

-       Lack of customer intimacy

-       Hodgepodge features and workflow layout

-       Inappropriate or unskilled use of technology

Likewise, the great product designs I’ve been around had the reverse:

-       Great customer intimacy

-       Carefully filtered features and layout

-       Integration of recently possible technologies

The best designers I've worked with are experts at filtering.  Most don’t have Steve Job’s intuitive sense of “what’s cool” so they rely on field research and spending time with customers – but accomplish the same end result…consistently great (or at least way above average) products. 

In fact, I’ll go as far as to claim that a designer’s main job is to filter; but not arbitrarily. There are rules to filtering. A designer must know what sells and what people will like. A designer must be familiar with what is just barely possible with the latest technology.  A designer must adhere to principles of good design and apply design heuristics to achieve consistency and quality.

Some of the best designers I know are not always the most creative people. Creatives are necessary but not sufficient ingredients to a design team.  I know of at least one famous European design studio that has tons of creative horsepower…but their product innovation is minimal and the overall success of their product designs is arguable.  Their products are highly stylized, but style alone doesn’t make a product design.

Bottom line – designers need to develop excellent filtering skills.