Visual design will not fix your broken business

I agree. The problem with some design these days is when it focuses too much on form and not enough on function. Great design by definition is form meets function. For apps, a great design means that the visuals don't come in the way of intuitive interactions. The visuals need to support and enhance the user interaction with inputs and outputs. Then you have great design.

Also, design of emotion things by has don norman has affirmed what you said. People will prefer find visual/aesthetically beautiful things to be more "usable" than its non visual/aesthetically pleasing counterpart.

Universal Principle Design calls this "aesthetic-usability" effect.

>Even the first Mac was pretty gorgeous"

It was the same beige as everything else and had the same square corners. It was aesthetically equivalent to a C64 or a PET 16 or any one of a large number of name brands.

That's not to say it wasn't sound industrial design, only that it's aesthetics didn't differentiate it in the way the first iMac's aesthetics differentiated it.

I think that design is just as important as how it functions. The two aren't mutually exclusive. In a day and age where there are so many options which can do similar things, the better looking one often gets chosen. So to say that if you read a book or two about design that magically you'll know what you need to in order to be an effective designer lacks any and all logic in thinking. That would be like me saying, well I finished my ruby course at codeacademy, now I'm an engineer with the ability to build apps.

Design, like coding, takes absolute determination and vigilance in perfecting. It not something you just 'learn to do' over a night or even a few months. The quote by Dieter (a design hero of mine) was also taken out of context. Everyone in the company needs to be adept in their role, and have a bit of say as to how the product should be. He didn't say you only need engineers who can read design books.

So how about you focus on doing what you do best, and let the designers continue focusing on what they do best. Perhaps start a company with 3 instead of two. A designer, an engineer, and a business minded individual. Imagine that.

A startup founder is a designer.

The entire purpose of a startup is to redesign some aspect of the user's life. A startup takes some experience in the world that has low usability, and makes that aspect of your life more usable. Having a founder with a design background, meaning someone who actually understands usability and how to simplify experiences CAN fix your broken business, assuming that the purpose of your business is to simplify some experience and make it more usable, which is what pretty much all businesses are. Additionally, the UI is not "just pixels" any more than a song is just "a C and a D chord" or a table is "just wood". The interface is the means through which the user problem is solved. From the user's perspective, the interface is the app -- the entirety of the app -- nothing other than the interface exists. And the user's perspective is the only one that matters.

Now, does this mean you can have a founding team without a developer? No, of course not. You need a technical founder. You should have a designer, a developer, and a hustler/biz person, but those don't need to be three separate people; one person can embody several of those qualities.