Ask HN: Technical, Business, or Designer

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1903088

by lachyg • 16 years ago

20 35 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hey HN,

So I was thinking today, why does it seem that the equation is always technical > business/marketing. Why is designer never a part of this equation for a startup founding team.

Especially looking at Apple, designers are the core of their business.

Interested in the discussion...

EDIT: To clarify, design means product and user interface design.

tomhoward• 16 years ago

It's probably helpful to distinguish between designer in the visual design or graphic design sense, and in the product maker sense.

A strong sense of design is a crucial attribute in any product maker, which would generally include every member of a startup's founding team, whether technical or business/marketing.

It's less important to have a visual/graphic designer in the founding team, and most startups outsource this type of work until they're big enough to warrant a dedicated resource.

It's worth noting that in the AirBnB founding team, Brian and Joe are both industrial designers, with Nate the only hacker.

lachyg4• 16 years ago

When saying designer, I mean a really strong product design, but also someone that can make things look nice. Someone that's highly skilled, not just someone who can navigate photoshop.

paolomaffei• 16 years ago

because "technical" encloses both "programming" and "design" (which by the way I don't think is as strategic as "Interaction Design") in the same way that "business" encloses "organization", "marketing" and "sales" (and possibly much more)

lachyg4• 16 years ago

Technical encloses design? I always thought it was just the programming. By design, I mean product and user interface design.

pluies• 16 years ago

> Technical encloses design?

By "design" at Apple, they mean "how the product work" — I think Jonathan Ive is to credit for that sentence. And Jonathan Ive is an industrial designer: he's not just here to make things look cute, he's there to make sure a product works well and is enjoyable to use.

In a start-up, especially a software one, "how the product work" is responsibility of the developer(s).

paraschopra• 16 years ago

I don't think design can be decoupled from "technical" part. All great software companies have designers and programmers working closely in a tightly knit team.

bobf• 16 years ago

I don't know that I agree with your assessment that "designers are the core" of Apple's business, but even so, Apple's current state seems to be rather irrelevant to a discussion about a combination of founders for a startup. Wouldn't looking at Apple's structure when they were a startup be more useful?

Aside from that, there are a lot of founders who have some level of design skills -- they just also happen to do other things, since that's how startups work. When you have limited resources, having a dedicated designer is generally going to be inefficient (unless design/UX are crucial to your particular startup in the early stages).

Also, non-designer founders have a lot of options regarding design -- they can outsource it, find/use a template, hack together some html/css, etc.

jcoop4• 16 years ago

I disagree.

A designer is an individual that solves problems by the use of a divergent-thought led process (A process very different to that of an engineer or MBA). They find problems, and solve them. Since solving a problem is the very pinnacle of building a business, I disagree with you that your claim that a designer is going to be useless.

It seems within the Tech-World the role of the designer is skewed, to the point even designers believe that their only role is to deal with the pixels on the screen. Take a look at leading design consultancies, such as IDEO, frog and Continuum and then try and tell me that a designer's role within a start-up is 'inefficient'.

jcoop4• 16 years ago

Great question.

It does seem that the tech-world lags behind in terms of the role of the designer, when compared with that of Industrial Design for example.

Take IDEO. An Industrial Design consultancy at heart who over the last 10 years have evolved into a consultancy that focus's more broadly on innovation, design thinking, strategy and designing businesses.

Whereas once upon a time an Industrial Designer's job would be to 'skin' a product and bridge the gap between marketing and engineering. The Industrial Designers role at leading design focused now companies now play a more prominent part in the development of business. Providing a divergent-thought design led process to tackle problems surrounding the product and service.

Web designers are yet to take take this step. And for the most part focus on the designing of pixels as opposed to the designing of businesses.

Andrew Chen breaks down IDEO's philosophy of human led design in which they argue that there's 3 perspectives when developing a service, which for me really sums up the true value a design-founder can hold. That of Viability, Feasibility and Desirability. In which:

Viability = Business focus (marketing, finance) Feasibility = Engineering focus (technologies, agile etc.) Desirability = Design focus (customers, aesthetics, etc.)

IDEO design from a desirability focus which means that the user comes first, everything is done from their eyes with a keen focus on usability and aesthetics in result creating a product that is highly revelvant and desirable to the user.

It's a great article, read more here: http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/12/04/does-every-startup-need...

I think more and more in the tech-world are starting to realise this, both designers and non-designers. Just look at the current opportunities for UX guys.

But in my opinion what we really need is more design founders and encourage more designers to spend less time on dribbble.com and more time studying the in's and out's of business.

nayanshah• 16 years ago

Design sense is definitely a must for everyone. Every programmer needs to spend atleast some time figuring out the cleanest interface (UI/API) for their code. Once a usable product is created, only then professional designer is need to make the product sell.

kingsidharth• 16 years ago

Designers, for apple, are part of technical team.

lachyg4• 16 years ago

Please excuse the terminology I used, I'm referring to programmers as the technical people.

Neputys5• 16 years ago

Partially the problem is in the word it self. As you can see from the discussion here and in many other places, as soon as someone asks similar question people start talking about what this word (designer) actually means.

Take architecture for example. In a way it's about designing buildings, but they have a separate term for it. You say it and everyone knows what you mean.

This is whats missing here I think. Some designers think only about "visual appeal" and can be even dangerous for a startup, because they don't know or often care about what it is they are actually building. Some are letter "T" people - they know one thing very very well and are more or less familiar with related fields. For them "design is how stuff works" (from your question Apple type designers). This kind of person can add a huge value to any business but we don't have a name for them (hopefully yet).

dhh5• 16 years ago

In my humble opinion, it's much more important to have a stellar product designer (decide how the thing works, then how it looks) than it is to have a stellar programmer.

The slight problem is that programmers generally have an easier time making a shitty-but-workable UI than designers have putting together shitty-but-workable code.

Thankfully that has been changing lately. I've talked to plenty of Rails developers who come from a design background and are teaching themselves how to program. Hell, that's how I originally met Jason Fried. He had taught himself to program and wanted some assistance.

So if I was putting my money on any startups (and I'm not!), I would much rather pick the ones with strong design talent than with strong programming talent -- unless the key element to what they were doing was uniquely technical.

jcoop4• 16 years ago

It's so nice to hear that come from a programmer :P

jeromec7• 16 years ago

This is a great comment, but I'm still unclear about the intended meaning of "designer". Are we only talking about graphic/artistic design, or just product design? The two are not the same (IMO). For example, I'm a programmer at the core, completely left-brained/logical, who struggles with art/graphic design. However, I am a great product designer (at least, IMO!). So, the one thing I look for to complete projects I'm working on is a graphic designer.

Also, I'm glad you qualified your last statement with this: "unless the key element to what they were doing was uniquely technical." I once had a graphic designer tell me his role was more important than the programming side to web sites, which I totally disagree with. I have a one word retort to that: craigslist. It's true that oftentimes great graphic design is a necessary ingredient to the success of a site, but that's not always the case.

Neputys5• 16 years ago

Everybody is essential, none is sufficient... (and craigslist has a design, it's just a different kind)

dhh5• 16 years ago

I mean designing the experience. How does it work, what goes where, what's important, etc. The "how does it look" is further down the line from there but still integrally connected. I find that the best product designers are people who can follow the rabbit hole all the way. From thinking about the problem to figuring out how many pixels the border should be.

hsuresh• 16 years ago

Design, in the sense you mention here, is something i would expect a good programmer to be good at. It is about problem solving, as well as understanding users of the solution. Designing a solution also requires a bit of algorithmic thinking. I have seen very few non-programmer designers who were good at designing a solution/application.

dhh5• 16 years ago

You might expect that, but my sense from the real world is that it is not true. I consider myself pretty good at this stuff and I'm still humbled by the insights of our designers.

jcoop4• 16 years ago

I think the issue here is that programmers, and MBA's for that matter, tend to be convergent-thinkers, whereas designers tend to be divergent-thinkers. Relying on a convergent thought process to solve a problem isn't the most effective way to tackle an issue and therefore involving designers in this process produces far more effective results.

turph• 16 years ago

Bit of a tangent here...

As a UI designer I find comments to these types of questions always a bit interesting. Don't get me wrong, I am happy to see folks thinking about the inclusion of design input initially. But what I find kinda amusing is that there is this tendency to quickly begin classifying designers (rightly so into visual & workflow), but the same discussion never happens for the term technical.

Your question simply says technical, and the community just accepts the term. I have work with many "technicals" who could code a front end but their work failed because they knew nothing about latency, back end architecture or scaling. And I have worked with many back end technical folks who felt the display layer was the work of junior people as it is not "the hard stuff". Like designers, technical folks fall into two camps as well - and very few excel at both.

Not looking to start a discussion war. Just want to state that the more legs you can put under your idea, the more balanced it will be. Apple succeeds for many reasons, but one thing is true - they have the culture and more importantly the infrastructure to assemble a large team of highly talented and focused individuals.

apz• 16 years ago

As a designer and a newcomer to the bay and valley I find this thread incredibly refreshing. I came to the bay to do exactly the kind of design described here: larger picture problem solving, going beyond what something looks like to connect aesthetics and communications more meaningfully with core functionality and belief.

But so far I've found that virtually no part of process of starting and running a company currently allows for this ki d of design thinking. There is only ever a design budget for what amounts to a fresh coat of paint, way after all the meaningful design decisions have been made.

How can design become a more meaningful part of the process?

Ask HN: Technical, Business, or Designer

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