41–50 of 66 posts
It appears that I may not have been as clear as I could have been: I'm not arguing against hiring designers.
Nor am I arguing against thinking about design, UI or how your app will look and work.
I do hold the view, though, that hiring a designer when you're bootstrapping is a premature optimization.
I guess the rule of thumb would be: pay the designer out of profits - no profits, no designer [1]
[1] and just to pre-empt the counter-arguments: a good product will survive a mediocre design; a great design won't save a bad product.
Steve Jobs: “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. [...] It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Find someone with familiarity in building good UIs I'm inferring from your comment that one can't have basic knowledge of decent UI without being a designer. Surely a coder can have a good idea about how to lay out a decent interface without having the skills to actually do so? It's this missing skill that a theme gives them.
A coder will generally have an idea about how to do so in the same way that a designer can understand how to architect and code a 900kloc enterprise app — it will be very superficial. In general, other people's jobs always look easy because you don't realize how much you actually suck at them.
Making that attractive is a completely different skillset and one I certainly don't have. However, based on the amount of flowery yet wholly unusable crap I come across, it seems many designers don't really have a good handle on usability either. Getting someone great at both is a rare find indeed, but it's not as if there's this huge cognitive gap between the two.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A coder will generally have an idea about how to do so in the same way that a designer can understand how to architect and code a 900kloc enterprise app — it will be very superficial. In general, other people's jobs always look easy because you don't realize how much you actually suck at them.
In general, other people's jobs always look easy because you don't realize how much you actually suck at them. That's an ironically sweeping statement to make. For example, are all UX specialists designers... or does it just seem easy to designers ;-)
2. "Are all UX specialists designers?" depends entirely on how we define our terms. If we define UX as a design discipline (as is common, since it basically is), then yes, by definition. If we define it as something else, then no.
Startups are all about learning and iterating quickly. Your contract designer won't help you with that. When you need them to pump out the next iteration, they'll be working on another project and available in two weeks. No, you need those skills in-house.
If you can't persuade a designer to join your team (and man, this is hard when you're bootstrapping), the best course of action is to learn some these skills yourself. Even if it's slow, and even if it's hard.
Of course, this is exactly the same argument we've all made and read a million times before, except with s/developer/designer.
That 'ugh' feeling some of you are feeling at the prospect of learning to design? Yeah, that's the same way the guy spinning his wheels looking for a technical co-founder feels, when you tell him to learn to code. Still got to be done.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A coder will generally have an idea about how to do so in the same way that a designer can understand how to architect and code a 900kloc enterprise app — it will be very superficial. In general, other people's jobs always look easy because you don't realize how much you actually suck at them.
I assume for the purposes of this discussion, design and usability have been melded into a single concept. However, sability principles are certainly something a developer can learn and scientifically derive. The SIGCHI proceedings are a great resource. Making that attractive is a completely different skillset and one I certainly don't have. However, based on the amount of flowery yet wholly unusable crap I come acro…
Say you need a tool to reorder categories. You know the best way to do this would be with drag and drop, but the theme only has table views! So you place an "order" field in a table view and hope for the best.
Then you realize that having a line chart for displaying open cases in a bug tracker is stupid, but it's the only view you have so you stick with it.
All these little compromises form an incredibly expensive form of technical debt, and pretty soon you have a product that users wouldn't touch with a stick. It's better to have an ugly product that works well than a pretty product that's a pain to use.
Using a downloadable theme on your product is somewhat akin to using Wordpress to program your web app. The compromises will be dictated by the CMS/Theme, instead of you being able to call the shots Say you need a tool to reorder categories. You know the best way to do this would be with drag and drop, but the theme only has table views! So you place an "order" field in a table view and hope for the best. Then you re…
So essentially using a similar logic, if I am a designer, I am better off using a scripting tool to make Facebook Clone than hire a developer? I know this comes off as an arrogant comment but I am drawing the logic straight from your arguments here. A developer cannot design so the best option they have is to use templates of design created with no clear audience, and goal other than probably looking good (which is n…
I think it's a bit different coming from the other end, unfortunately. Craigslist has come quite far without what we would all consider "design" (though that's debatable - functionality is design). Alas, traditional aesthetic design has never found its way to Craigslist. As a designer, you might find scripts / examples / tutorials that work, but without understanding the entire web stack it's going to be difficult to…
Again I cannot imagine doing this without a developer. At the same time things like Product Design and User Experience (note I am not even touching User Interface- which is what ou get with templates) require a certain level of detail that are perhaps better served by a designer who does this day in day out.
It appears that the general consensus is that just getting it out there is good enough reason to call it an MVP. I think this post from 37Signals nails it down as to what happens to user experience in an MVP http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2963-what-happens-to-user-exp...