A startup blogger writes a polemic with a blatantly baiting headline. Within 24 hours, another startup blogger will write a rebuttal with an equally baiting headline. Both will incite winding debates on Hacker News.
Meanwhile, other people will somehow manage to create value, ostensibly the goal of both bloggers, without writing confrontational screeds, perhaps even writing insightful blog posts intended to inspire and challenge rather than stir up conflict.
It's pretty specific and clear: it argues that plenty of startups are successful with virtually no design at all, with interfaces as clunky as "clients call us on the phone" or "emailing spreadsheets back and forth". It implicitly argues, "early stage startups are continuously faced with a choice of spending energy on design† or on customer discovery", and "early stage startups should virtually always opt for customer discovery".
I can see how a reasonable person might disagree with that.
I don't see how a reasonable person could say that the question isn't a reasonable one to pose.
† Admittedly a synecdoche for lots of other things, like scalability, code quality, test coverage, &c
And somehow HN still manages to find a way feel superior to both. Meanwhile, other people will somehow manage to create value, ostensibly the goal of HN posters, without writing snarky comments, they will succeed to create something truly new and inspiring.
> Design enhances value, it does not create it. Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing.
> It is to a massive degree much, much easier to spend a week pushing pixels to create something beautiful
> If there’s one thing you can rely on everyone having an opinion on, it’s how something should look.
(my emphasis)
The author's conniption would appear to be around graphic design. Graphic design is a subset of design, and covers nothing close to the full scope of what goes into the design of a new product. Design is about how things work and, often, what feelings they evoke in the process. How they look can be a part of that, but it needn't always be.
For example: how delightful is it to work with a great API? Something straightforward, well-documented, but nonetheless powerful? It's such a joy. But it requires effort: planning, understanding, experimentation, adjustment, refining, etc. In a word, design.
As a test, consider the following:
Is it first engine design or is it engine making? Airframe design or airframe building? Circuit design or circuit assembly? You can't make the engine until someone designs it first. How it looks doesn't much matter – how it works is non-negotiably essential.
Something that works well is said to be well-designed. Something that merely looks nice can be pretty – and terribly designed.
So a startup can't have something be both shitty and well-designed at the same time.
The notion that design is a differentiating characteristic for startups comes from the fact that many incumbent products simply do not work well. By designing a product that addresses a given workflow faster, with greater convenience, with greater fun, you're making something that works better.
We're past the point where you can build technology that fits requirements and stop there. Everyone else has done that already. Now success comes in making things that are satisfying, not obnoxious, that are easily learned, that make users excited to show their friends.
tl;dr: Someone doesn't grasp the difference between design and making nice graphics, throws a tantrum of a non-sequitur.
Your criticism seems to center around your dislike of him using "design" as a shorthand for "graphic design". But this is hardly unique to the author to say the least.
In any case, what you go to say hardly contradicts what the author is saying ... except if you redefine what he's saying as being about you think "design" ought mean instead of how he's clearly using it.
I think you're being disingenuous and deliberately misreading the OP because you wanted to write what amounts to a pet peeve. It was clear, even to you, what he meant; you admit as much in your last sentence. But you still went ahead and acted like you had not understood.
Had you merely disagreed with his terminology, and left at that - it would be more forgivable. But you're trying to use it to discount what he said by deliberately misreading it, and thereby you're not actually addressing his argument.
True, but this definition is a bit vague. Even if we think that this is not vague, then people with graphics design background should stop calling themselves designers, and engineers (who have years of training on some aspect of how some things should work) could call themselves designers. There will always be a debate on what exactly 'design' is, and who exactly a 'designer' is, because this is a bit artifical terminology in my opinion. (Long years ago, when engineers created mostly buildings engineers were also meant to be designers.)
I am an engineer/programmer, but I would feel extremely sad, uncreative, and a worthless biorobot if I could not see myself a 'designer' if we take the meaning of design very broadly.
When contemporary reviews pan a product for poor design they usually complain about how it looks and weighs. Few reviewers take the effort to dig in and critique what the product does. Given this status quo its hard to blame anyone for equating cosmetics with design.
Fun question - is emacs well designed ? What would a reviewer on engadget etc say if they came across it. Would they concede it has a better design than say - Textmate?
When Apple fans talk about the product being well designed its inevitably about the physical manifestation of the product - how it looks, what its battery life is, its weight etc. I fully concede that apple products are well designed in their own right and have a fantastical attention to detail, but the only details that get covered in the press and by evangelists are the ones that have to do with cosmetics or physical attributes.
Lastly - someone on this thread mentioned craigslist as having bad design. I think that is the classic example of equating cosmetics with design. I have yet to find another website that allows me to finish the task at hand with as little fuss and as few clicks. There are flaws to craigslist - like their ability to curate content in realtime - but their design to me is unobtrusive and efficient.
Well said. The misuse of the word design is ubiquitous.
I just looked at the Designer Fund thing for a second, but I noticed a headshot of Luke Wroblewski on there. He co-founded the IxDA, wrote the books Mobile First and Web Form Design (both awesome), and then was co-founder and chief product officer at Bagcheck (that got acquired by Twitter). He's creating value as far as I'm concerned.
> We're past the point where you can build technology that fits requirements and stop there. Everyone else has done that already.
You are too quick to close this big door here. You could do them relatively "ugly" and "difficult to use" if you'd do a driverless cars, a plane with real beds, a self-backuped unlimited size hard-drive for music and movies, a viable water desalinisator, a cheap enough 3D printer, a bodyless computer monitor, or even a working dating site.
Not that I disagree with the rest, but let's not say everything is done already and just needs to be done better.
"""This stuff was bizarre to me:
> Design enhances value, it does not create it. Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing.
> It is to a massive degree much, much easier to spend a week pushing pixels to create something beautiful
> If there’s one thing you can rely on everyone having an opinion on, it’s how something should look."""
"""
Really? Because it seems damn logical to me.
"""The author's conniption would appear to be around graphic design. Graphic design is a subset of design, and covers nothing close to the full scope of what goes into the design of a new product. Design is about how things work and, often, what feelings they evoke in the process. How they look can be a part of that, but it needn't always be."""
Yeah. Only in web design it almost always are. And in the specific "over-designed" startup web services he rants about it always is. We all heard the quote "design is how it works" from Jobs et co. But:
1) In most cases it's 80% graphic design and 20% though of how it works.
2) How it works still means nothing, if WHAT IT DOES does not add value.
Customers don't care how "well designed" (graphically AND in "how it works") a service is, if that service does nothing useful for them.
Example: a well designed and totally usable "social something" site -- and why would I want to use that if no one of my friends is using it?
tl;dr: both how it looks and how it works are secondary to what if offers the customer
It should be no surprise that, yes, if you can pump enough raw "value" into something, however you care to define value, that you can ignore or short shrift design. Go ahead, limit your chances by killing your first impressions. Write poorly in your presentations while you are at it.
I mean if gold starts pouring out of your user's computer's USB ports when they load up your web page, you're right. They won't care what the background color is or what that blob in your logo is supposed to represent. If the reward is high enough, they'll kill themselves finding that magic button among all the log ins, captchas, and cryptic navigation tools.
But if you're trying to sell a new idea, one that may be unfamiliar, or if your "value" depends on the size of your user base, you might want to spent the time and effort to respect your user enough to make it clear what you intend to do. And what's in it for them.
Good ideas, and value, are sometimes not enough. They require a context to be useful and acceptable. Good engineers know this.
And, sometimes, a nice little shrubbery, in just the right place, and a splash of color, can make all the difference.
Fun rant. I wish he defined what exactly he means by design. (Amusing exercise: replace all occurrences of 'design' with 'blub'.) The core of the post for me was:
> Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing. A product or service that is indispensably useful yet looks like ass is infinitely more likely to be successful than a product that solves zero problems but looks like a work of art.
I'd say sure, in general, though that does beg the question for what problems so many "useless" but successful apps solve. (Mindless entertainment, I guess.) More importantly, though, "design" and functionality and usefulness are not at odds.
And yet Apple is/was the most valuable company in the world, largely due to design.
Saying "design is horseshit" makes about as much sense as saying "engineering is horseshit" or "writing well is horseshit". Read: it makes absolutely no sense.
Apple is a not a particularly pertinent example. I'm not particularly familiar with Apple's history, but I suspect that their products delivered value immediately--people actually had a use for their stuff that nobody else could supply. Then, thanks to design (and marketing, and fashion, and engineering, and...) they grew.
The whole point of the article is that the foundation of any successful company lies in the value it provides people. Everything else--design is singled out because of the earlier article on the matter--is built on that foundation. Since a startup is just the foundation of a company, its primary goal should be creating a product people use.
In short, he didn't really mean that design is completely worthless--it is merely worthless without a solid product behind it. The same could be said about engineering and strong copy; neither is going to matter if you're making something utterly useless. Thus, given this meaning of "design is horseshit", "engineering/writing well is horseshit" actually makes sense.
Coincidentally, I agree with the idea behind the post: producing something viable is the most important thing a startup can do; the younger a startup is, the more important the product's value. However, I think the overly sensational, antagonistic and slightly misleading title was poorly chosen to represent his point. The post is solid but the title isn't. It does drive clicks and readers, so in a sense it was successful, but primarily from its less desirable qualities.
Design is not a pretty facade to a product, and designers aren't just responsible for aesthetics. Design is as much about how the product works as how it looks, and a designer worth their stock options understands that they aren't drawing pretty pictures of websites, they're designing with a purpose: to create an enjoyable experience and ultimately a functional, beautiful product that adds value to users lives.
I think he gets that. I think he sees the real tradeoff, between elegant, usable, pleasurable user experiences that in and of themselves make people want to come back to the product, and raw value creation. And he's saying, for early stage startups, raw value creation is more important no matter how clunky it is.
Design alone is horseshit.
Engineering alone is horshit.
Blogging alone is horseshit.
Marketing alone is horseshit.
But put these together in the right proportion and you get a beautiful product. The proportion depends on your product/service. It takes a lot less selling, if the visual design of the product is impressive. It releases dopamine in your customer's head which urges them to put their credit card number in the checkout form. It may not be important for enterprise product as the person signing the cheque does not use your product. But it is vital for consumer and small business based products. But I agree with the author that pretty design is not a substitute for good engineering, good customer support or good marketing.
you were right at the start: Engineering is also horseshit. You can have the most beautifully engineered solution to a problem that nobody has or is willing to pay to have solved, and you'll still have a bullshit startup. Marketing is also horseshit. You can have the most amazingly viral video for a product that nobody wants and you will still end up with 0 sales and long-term, 0 customers.
the point here is that there isn't a startup fund or growing sentiment that seems to champion engineering or blogging or X as a fundamental part of the startup equation. it's all just a toolbox. but strangely, there is one for design.
the real issue that early startups need to focus on is solving a problem and creating value. that's actually much, much harder than you think and it should be 100% of the focus in the early stages.
Design is not just about pixel pushing and pixel perfecting. It is more than that. The blogger purely equates design = making things pretty, which is not true.
Design starts from understanding and empathizing with the user. Design helps to shape the product and connect with the users emotionally.
The Design Fund highlights the importance of designers in startups not just because they make things look pretty. Designers are usually trained to understand users emotionally. An engineer look at a problem and start using equations to solve it. A designer look at a problem, start by understanding the user, and develop a way to solve it.
Design teams in big companies have User Researchers (on the ground, understanding users, find out needs, etc), User Experience Designers (connecting the dots from research to product, how the product should function and flow), Interaction Designers (that transition effect you see in iOS? not just pretty. Helps users to orientate where they are at), Visual Designers (make things pretty).
As you can see, in the whole field of design, only Visual Designers are the ones who really make things pretty. Once again, The Design Fund values designers because they look at things differently, and they can build products with emotion. (Apple products have a lot of emotion tied to people)
In fact, the design community faces a huge problem because almost everyone thinks design == make things beautiful and that is one of the things that has been holding back design in startups for so long.
commieneko said it well:
"Design is clarity.
Design is intention.
Design is function.
Design is appeal.
And, sure, design is appearance."
So yes, spending a ton of time altering the drop shadow on your button and the RGB value of your logo might be time wasted in a startup. But spending time clarifying what your product does, or devising a smoother way to onboard users, or figuring out a way to highlight your more expensive plan, or any number of other things good designers are thinking about while also "making things beautiful" is not wasting time.
Actually, designing a smoother on-ramping process is a huge waste of time if you're trying to on-ramp users into a product they're not going to find valuable. This point seems pedantic but isn't; plenty of startups create well-oiled machines that nobody needs, and fail as a result.
> I love good design and I am good at design. But I’ve never called myself a designer.
> 1. Designers tweet and blog
> 2. Design is a cheap way to appear like you’re creating value
...
> I’ve created products / services in the past that have garnered praise for their design.
> 3. Everyone’s a fucking designer now
Face it, you're a designer.
> Design enhances value, it does not create it. Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing.
I don't understand how enhancing value doesn't create value. Value is value, there isn't good value and bad value, there's only more or less of it. If pushing pixels does a better job enhancing value than creating features then I am absolutely going to (have someone else) design the shit out of that product.
I see design much like I see testing. Both of these are meant to build integrity in your product. Design is perceived integrity, while testing is conceptual. If you don't proactively maintain the integrity then the lack of quality compounds. Treating them like a second class citizen will do nothing but cause troubles.
>I don't understand how enhancing value doesn't create value. Value is value, there isn't good value and bad value
He was saying that design is multiplicative, not additive. You could have an extremely beautiful and well designed app but, if the idea doesn't first provide value to your customers, you're just polishing the brass on the Titanic.
"The Design of Everyday Things" talks primarily about functionality, and frames design so broadly as to be almost indistinguishable from "solving a user problem".
As an example, Roy Fielding describes the URLs that a RESTful webservice includes in its representation of a resource (for what transitions are available to other states) as "affordances".
It could even be argued that Codd's relational model was a better "design" for thinking about databases, which he presented in terms of the problem of data models being too closely coupled with storage representation.
Of course, even this broad sense of design doesn't address whether there's a market for a solution; but it does address whether you can make a solution that's better.
I can see the sense in seeking a problem that needs to be solved - in being "market-driven"... but personally, I'm much more excited about creating something better (which is only possible when you already know the problem and some existing solution, because "better than" takes two operands). And that seems to be the history of all the products I admire.
The author makes some interesting points but should be more specific that he is referring to Aesthetic Design.
Design is everywhere not just in the shiny stuff. Design is a workflow, response, messaging, interaction... These are all areas of design you might not be able to see immediately but are often the key components of making a great product.
My guess is that every one of the companies he considers successful had good design baked into their products somewhere (even if they had terrible aesthetics).
To categorize all design in this way is very misleading to those starting a company.
Some final words on this. Some people have interpreted this as me not understanding the value of good design. I assure you I do from experience, tweet at me if you want specifics.
However - create value before exploring how design can enhance the experience. Solve a real customer problem. If you’re an early stage startup with no revenue, don’t even think about design! Think hard about what problem you can solve that a customer will give you $10 for and work your ass off at delivering that $10 of value as fast and as cheaply as possible. It doesn’t even matter if you’re not aiming to make a paid service. If people won’t give you money to solve their problems, it’s not a real fucking problem. It’s just another novelty echo-chamber startup that you might get a chance to flip to a bigger fish if you win the startup lottery. Don’t be an idiot and buy into that. Solve a problem, live forever. The idea that design is what early stage startups should be busying their time with is a notion I find utterly wrong.
"If you’re an early stage startup with no revenue, don’t even think about design!"
One would thinking that making your credit card form easy to use and find for customers is fairly integral to making revenue. You can have the most awesome service in the world but if you make it hard for people to pay you money, you're not going to make money.
There are many strategies for survival. Some involve taking tiny steps with customer revenue at each one. Some involve solving a bigger problem that takes time and investment. Whichever approach you take, you usually need some luck to survive.
While that's a ridiculously trolling headline, I agree with the argument. I'm a designer(check my profile) and my job is to communicate ideas and products not create them.
It sounds like he is attacking a straw man. It doesn’t seem like anyone is making the arguments he is attacking, especially not on the page he is linking to and saying he is responding to. Specifically (for example) no one seems to claim that designers are “the new kings of startups”.
Not only that, but his countering suggestion is a single word, "value", that he doesn't define or substantiate. Beyond any simple idea of what people want, you almost always need to build a product that they can use and like to use, and that needs good design. Not graphic design -- interaction design.
Why so many of these content-less posts on HN front page lately?
(I submitted this, but don't know the author personally, so there are some assumptions built into to the following.)
[edit- regarding issue of straw man perception]
The issue is that nobody who makes beautiful novelty thinks their own work is beautiful novelty. (So nobody will appear in favor of it, even if they make it.)
So it's not quite a straw man. Everybody agrees that a certain type of thing is bad, but nobody thinks they themselves are responsible for that thing.
I suspect the author has some specific start-ups in mind but didn't want to call them out. Why have people be distracted by the drama of him dissing $startup in a blog post when he really wants people to ponder a more big picture idea?
Although I may agree with the premise in the article, I'm sick of this meme like quality of HN headlines. Must we parrot popular, sensationalist headlines to get a point across? The purpose of these articles is to stir up enough controversy to get to the front page of HN.
This article hits a note with the startup community. It actually redefines design from "look & feel" to "practicality". IMO this is a much needed awakening, given all the media hoopla around path's new button. Nobody buys buttons.
Every reductive reasoning is horseshit. Someone needs to write an article about: "Start ups are frequently so complex that their behavior is emergent: it cannot be deduced from the properties of the elements alone."
Another individual conflating design with aesthetic styling. The article has plenty of merit but it is lost in the continuing abuse of what the practice of design is.
The author is not suggesting not having quality design. He isn't even saying design isn't an itegral part of product development.
he's saying everyone is skipping step one, namely figure out what problem you're going to solve. No one asks the proverbial question 'How is my product going to get them laid' (to paraphrase jwz) They just skip straight to having a great way of doing the same exact thing everyone else does just as well.
I am a huge fan of the "how will it get my users laid" way of thinking. If your product/service can provide that kind of value even in some protracted form (i.e. I'm not just talking about dating sites) you're on the way to nailing it.
[+] [-] mortenjorck|14 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, other people will somehow manage to create value, ostensibly the goal of both bloggers, without writing confrontational screeds, perhaps even writing insightful blog posts intended to inspire and challenge rather than stir up conflict.
Maybe it's writing polemics that is horseshit.
[+] [-] tptacek|14 years ago|reply
It's pretty specific and clear: it argues that plenty of startups are successful with virtually no design at all, with interfaces as clunky as "clients call us on the phone" or "emailing spreadsheets back and forth". It implicitly argues, "early stage startups are continuously faced with a choice of spending energy on design† or on customer discovery", and "early stage startups should virtually always opt for customer discovery".
I can see how a reasonable person might disagree with that.
I don't see how a reasonable person could say that the question isn't a reasonable one to pose.
† Admittedly a synecdoche for lots of other things, like scalability, code quality, test coverage, &c
[+] [-] fookyong|14 years ago|reply
This is just a topic that bugged me.
[+] [-] verroq|14 years ago|reply
Maybe it's posting on HN that is horseshit.
[+] [-] dmauro|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bokardo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danilocampos|14 years ago|reply
> Design enhances value, it does not create it. Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing.
> It is to a massive degree much, much easier to spend a week pushing pixels to create something beautiful
> If there’s one thing you can rely on everyone having an opinion on, it’s how something should look.
(my emphasis)
The author's conniption would appear to be around graphic design. Graphic design is a subset of design, and covers nothing close to the full scope of what goes into the design of a new product. Design is about how things work and, often, what feelings they evoke in the process. How they look can be a part of that, but it needn't always be.
For example: how delightful is it to work with a great API? Something straightforward, well-documented, but nonetheless powerful? It's such a joy. But it requires effort: planning, understanding, experimentation, adjustment, refining, etc. In a word, design.
As a test, consider the following:
Is it first engine design or is it engine making? Airframe design or airframe building? Circuit design or circuit assembly? You can't make the engine until someone designs it first. How it looks doesn't much matter – how it works is non-negotiably essential.
Something that works well is said to be well-designed. Something that merely looks nice can be pretty – and terribly designed.
So a startup can't have something be both shitty and well-designed at the same time.
The notion that design is a differentiating characteristic for startups comes from the fact that many incumbent products simply do not work well. By designing a product that addresses a given workflow faster, with greater convenience, with greater fun, you're making something that works better.
We're past the point where you can build technology that fits requirements and stop there. Everyone else has done that already. Now success comes in making things that are satisfying, not obnoxious, that are easily learned, that make users excited to show their friends.
tl;dr: Someone doesn't grasp the difference between design and making nice graphics, throws a tantrum of a non-sequitur.
[+] [-] joe_the_user|14 years ago|reply
In any case, what you go to say hardly contradicts what the author is saying ... except if you redefine what he's saying as being about you think "design" ought mean instead of how he's clearly using it.
[+] [-] barrkel|14 years ago|reply
Had you merely disagreed with his terminology, and left at that - it would be more forgivable. But you're trying to use it to discount what he said by deliberately misreading it, and thereby you're not actually addressing his argument.
[+] [-] nadam|14 years ago|reply
True, but this definition is a bit vague. Even if we think that this is not vague, then people with graphics design background should stop calling themselves designers, and engineers (who have years of training on some aspect of how some things should work) could call themselves designers. There will always be a debate on what exactly 'design' is, and who exactly a 'designer' is, because this is a bit artifical terminology in my opinion. (Long years ago, when engineers created mostly buildings engineers were also meant to be designers.)
I am an engineer/programmer, but I would feel extremely sad, uncreative, and a worthless biorobot if I could not see myself a 'designer' if we take the meaning of design very broadly.
[+] [-] dman|14 years ago|reply
Fun question - is emacs well designed ? What would a reviewer on engadget etc say if they came across it. Would they concede it has a better design than say - Textmate?
When Apple fans talk about the product being well designed its inevitably about the physical manifestation of the product - how it looks, what its battery life is, its weight etc. I fully concede that apple products are well designed in their own right and have a fantastical attention to detail, but the only details that get covered in the press and by evangelists are the ones that have to do with cosmetics or physical attributes.
Lastly - someone on this thread mentioned craigslist as having bad design. I think that is the classic example of equating cosmetics with design. I have yet to find another website that allows me to finish the task at hand with as little fuss and as few clicks. There are flaws to craigslist - like their ability to curate content in realtime - but their design to me is unobtrusive and efficient.
[+] [-] psweber|14 years ago|reply
I just looked at the Designer Fund thing for a second, but I noticed a headshot of Luke Wroblewski on there. He co-founded the IxDA, wrote the books Mobile First and Web Form Design (both awesome), and then was co-founder and chief product officer at Bagcheck (that got acquired by Twitter). He's creating value as far as I'm concerned.
[+] [-] gbog|14 years ago|reply
You are too quick to close this big door here. You could do them relatively "ugly" and "difficult to use" if you'd do a driverless cars, a plane with real beds, a self-backuped unlimited size hard-drive for music and movies, a viable water desalinisator, a cheap enough 3D printer, a bodyless computer monitor, or even a working dating site.
Not that I disagree with the rest, but let's not say everything is done already and just needs to be done better.
[+] [-] tompetty|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dextorious|14 years ago|reply
Really? Because it seems damn logical to me.
"""The author's conniption would appear to be around graphic design. Graphic design is a subset of design, and covers nothing close to the full scope of what goes into the design of a new product. Design is about how things work and, often, what feelings they evoke in the process. How they look can be a part of that, but it needn't always be."""
Yeah. Only in web design it almost always are. And in the specific "over-designed" startup web services he rants about it always is. We all heard the quote "design is how it works" from Jobs et co. But:
1) In most cases it's 80% graphic design and 20% though of how it works. 2) How it works still means nothing, if WHAT IT DOES does not add value.
Customers don't care how "well designed" (graphically AND in "how it works") a service is, if that service does nothing useful for them.
Example: a well designed and totally usable "social something" site -- and why would I want to use that if no one of my friends is using it?
tl;dr: both how it looks and how it works are secondary to what if offers the customer
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] commieneko|14 years ago|reply
Design is intention.
Design is function.
Design is appeal.
And, sure, design is appearance.
It should be no surprise that, yes, if you can pump enough raw "value" into something, however you care to define value, that you can ignore or short shrift design. Go ahead, limit your chances by killing your first impressions. Write poorly in your presentations while you are at it.
I mean if gold starts pouring out of your user's computer's USB ports when they load up your web page, you're right. They won't care what the background color is or what that blob in your logo is supposed to represent. If the reward is high enough, they'll kill themselves finding that magic button among all the log ins, captchas, and cryptic navigation tools.
But if you're trying to sell a new idea, one that may be unfamiliar, or if your "value" depends on the size of your user base, you might want to spent the time and effort to respect your user enough to make it clear what you intend to do. And what's in it for them.
Good ideas, and value, are sometimes not enough. They require a context to be useful and acceptable. Good engineers know this.
And, sometimes, a nice little shrubbery, in just the right place, and a splash of color, can make all the difference.
[+] [-] steele|14 years ago|reply
Invoice is in the mail.
[+] [-] Jach|14 years ago|reply
> Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing. A product or service that is indispensably useful yet looks like ass is infinitely more likely to be successful than a product that solves zero problems but looks like a work of art.
I'd say sure, in general, though that does beg the question for what problems so many "useless" but successful apps solve. (Mindless entertainment, I guess.) More importantly, though, "design" and functionality and usefulness are not at odds.
For some fun (probably less comprehensible) rantings in the other direction, have a look at http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2011/05/engineers-are-infe... and http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2011/06/design-principles-...
[+] [-] kfalter|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] keiferski|14 years ago|reply
Saying "design is horseshit" makes about as much sense as saying "engineering is horseshit" or "writing well is horseshit". Read: it makes absolutely no sense.
[+] [-] tikhonj|14 years ago|reply
The whole point of the article is that the foundation of any successful company lies in the value it provides people. Everything else--design is singled out because of the earlier article on the matter--is built on that foundation. Since a startup is just the foundation of a company, its primary goal should be creating a product people use.
In short, he didn't really mean that design is completely worthless--it is merely worthless without a solid product behind it. The same could be said about engineering and strong copy; neither is going to matter if you're making something utterly useless. Thus, given this meaning of "design is horseshit", "engineering/writing well is horseshit" actually makes sense.
Coincidentally, I agree with the idea behind the post: producing something viable is the most important thing a startup can do; the younger a startup is, the more important the product's value. However, I think the overly sensational, antagonistic and slightly misleading title was poorly chosen to represent his point. The post is solid but the title isn't. It does drive clicks and readers, so in a sense it was successful, but primarily from its less desirable qualities.
[+] [-] wycats|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thesash|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lisperforlife|14 years ago|reply
Design alone is horseshit. Engineering alone is horshit. Blogging alone is horseshit. Marketing alone is horseshit.
But put these together in the right proportion and you get a beautiful product. The proportion depends on your product/service. It takes a lot less selling, if the visual design of the product is impressive. It releases dopamine in your customer's head which urges them to put their credit card number in the checkout form. It may not be important for enterprise product as the person signing the cheque does not use your product. But it is vital for consumer and small business based products. But I agree with the author that pretty design is not a substitute for good engineering, good customer support or good marketing.
[+] [-] fookyong|14 years ago|reply
you were right at the start: Engineering is also horseshit. You can have the most beautifully engineered solution to a problem that nobody has or is willing to pay to have solved, and you'll still have a bullshit startup. Marketing is also horseshit. You can have the most amazingly viral video for a product that nobody wants and you will still end up with 0 sales and long-term, 0 customers.
the point here is that there isn't a startup fund or growing sentiment that seems to champion engineering or blogging or X as a fundamental part of the startup equation. it's all just a toolbox. but strangely, there is one for design.
the real issue that early startups need to focus on is solving a problem and creating value. that's actually much, much harder than you think and it should be 100% of the focus in the early stages.
forget about engineering and design.
[+] [-] lominming|14 years ago|reply
Design starts from understanding and empathizing with the user. Design helps to shape the product and connect with the users emotionally.
The Design Fund highlights the importance of designers in startups not just because they make things look pretty. Designers are usually trained to understand users emotionally. An engineer look at a problem and start using equations to solve it. A designer look at a problem, start by understanding the user, and develop a way to solve it.
Design teams in big companies have User Researchers (on the ground, understanding users, find out needs, etc), User Experience Designers (connecting the dots from research to product, how the product should function and flow), Interaction Designers (that transition effect you see in iOS? not just pretty. Helps users to orientate where they are at), Visual Designers (make things pretty).
As you can see, in the whole field of design, only Visual Designers are the ones who really make things pretty. Once again, The Design Fund values designers because they look at things differently, and they can build products with emotion. (Apple products have a lot of emotion tied to people)
*I am not part of The Design Fund.
[+] [-] ianstormtaylor|14 years ago|reply
In fact, the design community faces a huge problem because almost everyone thinks design == make things beautiful and that is one of the things that has been holding back design in startups for so long.
commieneko said it well:
"Design is clarity. Design is intention. Design is function. Design is appeal. And, sure, design is appearance."
So yes, spending a ton of time altering the drop shadow on your button and the RGB value of your logo might be time wasted in a startup. But spending time clarifying what your product does, or devising a smoother way to onboard users, or figuring out a way to highlight your more expensive plan, or any number of other things good designers are thinking about while also "making things beautiful" is not wasting time.
[+] [-] tptacek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lojack|14 years ago|reply
> 1. Designers tweet and blog
> 2. Design is a cheap way to appear like you’re creating value
...
> I’ve created products / services in the past that have garnered praise for their design.
> 3. Everyone’s a fucking designer now
Face it, you're a designer.
> Design enhances value, it does not create it. Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing.
I don't understand how enhancing value doesn't create value. Value is value, there isn't good value and bad value, there's only more or less of it. If pushing pixels does a better job enhancing value than creating features then I am absolutely going to (have someone else) design the shit out of that product.
I see design much like I see testing. Both of these are meant to build integrity in your product. Design is perceived integrity, while testing is conceptual. If you don't proactively maintain the integrity then the lack of quality compounds. Treating them like a second class citizen will do nothing but cause troubles.
[+] [-] HeyImAlex|14 years ago|reply
He was saying that design is multiplicative, not additive. You could have an extremely beautiful and well designed app but, if the idea doesn't first provide value to your customers, you're just polishing the brass on the Titanic.
[+] [-] 6ren|14 years ago|reply
As an example, Roy Fielding describes the URLs that a RESTful webservice includes in its representation of a resource (for what transitions are available to other states) as "affordances". It could even be argued that Codd's relational model was a better "design" for thinking about databases, which he presented in terms of the problem of data models being too closely coupled with storage representation.
Of course, even this broad sense of design doesn't address whether there's a market for a solution; but it does address whether you can make a solution that's better. I can see the sense in seeking a problem that needs to be solved - in being "market-driven"... but personally, I'm much more excited about creating something better (which is only possible when you already know the problem and some existing solution, because "better than" takes two operands). And that seems to be the history of all the products I admire.
[+] [-] alexwolfe|14 years ago|reply
Design is everywhere not just in the shiny stuff. Design is a workflow, response, messaging, interaction... These are all areas of design you might not be able to see immediately but are often the key components of making a great product.
My guess is that every one of the companies he considers successful had good design baked into their products somewhere (even if they had terrible aesthetics).
To categorize all design in this way is very misleading to those starting a company.
[+] [-] fookyong|14 years ago|reply
Some final words on this. Some people have interpreted this as me not understanding the value of good design. I assure you I do from experience, tweet at me if you want specifics.
However - create value before exploring how design can enhance the experience. Solve a real customer problem. If you’re an early stage startup with no revenue, don’t even think about design! Think hard about what problem you can solve that a customer will give you $10 for and work your ass off at delivering that $10 of value as fast and as cheaply as possible. It doesn’t even matter if you’re not aiming to make a paid service. If people won’t give you money to solve their problems, it’s not a real fucking problem. It’s just another novelty echo-chamber startup that you might get a chance to flip to a bigger fish if you win the startup lottery. Don’t be an idiot and buy into that. Solve a problem, live forever. The idea that design is what early stage startups should be busying their time with is a notion I find utterly wrong.
http://yongfook.com/post/14295124427/design-is-horseshit
[+] [-] limedaring|14 years ago|reply
One would thinking that making your credit card form easy to use and find for customers is fairly integral to making revenue. You can have the most awesome service in the world but if you make it hard for people to pay you money, you're not going to make money.
[+] [-] NormM|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewfelix|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fookyong|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ugh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cicatriz|14 years ago|reply
Why so many of these content-less posts on HN front page lately?
[+] [-] thesethings|14 years ago|reply
[edit- regarding issue of straw man perception] The issue is that nobody who makes beautiful novelty thinks their own work is beautiful novelty. (So nobody will appear in favor of it, even if they make it.)
So it's not quite a straw man. Everybody agrees that a certain type of thing is bad, but nobody thinks they themselves are responsible for that thing.
I suspect the author has some specific start-ups in mind but didn't want to call them out. Why have people be distracted by the drama of him dissing $startup in a blog post when he really wants people to ponder a more big picture idea?
[+] [-] wasd|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billions|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cateye|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbuk|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehutch79|14 years ago|reply
The author is not suggesting not having quality design. He isn't even saying design isn't an itegral part of product development.
he's saying everyone is skipping step one, namely figure out what problem you're going to solve. No one asks the proverbial question 'How is my product going to get them laid' (to paraphrase jwz) They just skip straight to having a great way of doing the same exact thing everyone else does just as well.
[+] [-] fookyong|14 years ago|reply
I am a huge fan of the "how will it get my users laid" way of thinking. If your product/service can provide that kind of value even in some protracted form (i.e. I'm not just talking about dating sites) you're on the way to nailing it.