Ask HN: Why do we (hackers) suck at design?

I think this is very subjective, but I'm going to give it a shot.

People are usually either artistic/creative or booksmart.

Of course there are people that excels at both, but not in the general public.

So I would assume it's because most "hackers" are booksmart and not as much artistic/creative.

You're not actually asking the right question, because it's not just about design and creativity.

A great article: https://www.healthline.com/health/left-brain-vs-right-brain

That should sound as sensible a question as "Why do designers suck at coding?" The meta question is why is this a seemingly reasonable question?

As a coder, I don’t think I “suck at design” in terms of product decisions. However, it’s way easier to code something I have a sketch file for than something I have in my head. Whether I made it or someone else made it doesn’t matter. Just having something to work against makes for much more consistent UI.

IME this is because when we code without a spec, we haven’t answered all the questions up front. Either we box ourselves in by how we designed the code, or we make a spaghetti soup of UI buttons as we add unplanned features.

So, the important thing is not necessarily that we as coders “suck at design,” so much as that we tend to sometimes code without first thinking about the UI.

Most designers suck at design.

Consider the convergence of design of laptops and smartphones. If designers were competent, we would see a multitude of designs, since a good design must be designed for something, analoguous to how optimization must optimize for something. Given the extreme similarity between available designs, there are presumably a significant number of professional designers incapable of generating anything interesting. (I would wager most laptop/smartphone designs at the moment are designed as cheap apple copies, which makes for no differentiation since everything else is designed for the same.)

I think it requires a different mindset in that with programming, I can, for many tasks but not all, kind of get in the zone and crank things out. But (for me) design is not like that. It's more experimental, a bit slower paced, requires a lot of subjective decisions and iterations. And sometimes the changes are very minor -- it's no code refactoring typically. But a number of small changes can have a big impact (just like code in a way). I think part of the problem is the decision tree is very big and the subjectivity makes it easy to go down the wrong path. So it's easy to dismiss it as too hard and settle for subpar.

I think all of that is fine as long as you pick it up again another day and keep on trying to make it better. I was all set to hire a designer to help with my most recent side project but I wanted to tidy it up a bit first and I ended up really happy with my changes and decided not to go with a designer.

So I think it is about effort and being willing to approach it as something different that takes time and relaxed effort to improve at.

As a side note, I'd recommend not studying (or accepting as ideal) designers output before evaluating it critically. A lot seem fixated still on print and ship static screens that often overlook user experience (or don't convey it at all). When I see things like more than 3 to 4 different font sizes on a web page design, I start to suspect the designer is more print-orientated. Obviously this is subjective and I'm talking about an initial design. Sometimes such a variety of font sizes is required but I wouldn't expect that early on. The hint here is that simplicity is incredibly powerful in design and it is more accessible to beginners so even if you think 10 font sizes on a page is fine, you might not want to go that path as a beginner.