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Design is Horseshit

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Re: Design is Horseshit

#71

Post by NormM »

jmtame wrote: post #46
wycats wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple wasn't a "design startup". Sure, Jobs valued design, but none of Apple's founders were designers.

"Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works." - SJ Jobs had a major role in how the products at Apple have worked from the start. I also recall Jobs making interface design references in his Stanford commencement speech about typography, calligraphy, kerning, and typesets. This happened before he started Apple.

One of my favorite SJ quotes! I find it hard to believe the poster is opposed to spending time figuring out how your product should work. Maybe he really just means a startup needs to focus early on, and not waste time on inessentials. I actually hope, though, that Apple's success will make good design (in SJ's sense) more common in the tech industry.

Re: Design is Horseshit

#72

Post by dicemoose »

limedaring wrote: post #63
fookyong wrote: post #50

Updated: 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 so…

"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.

But, that time designing the form is better spent making sure that you actually have something that customers would pay for. My experience has been that if you have something of value, customers will want to pay for it and you can worry about getting paid at that point.

Worrying about how to get money for a product without value is a waste of time/resources.

Re: Design is Horseshit

#73

Post by danilocampos »

fookyong wrote: post #70
yonasb wrote: post #55

Great post. The only thing I disagree with is your distaste for the designer fund. I think helping designers build startups is a good thing. And it's also important to note the difference between visual design (UI) and UX. You can't create value without good UX. And good designers do both UI and UX. So design is important, the visual aspect not so much, before you have something ppl want

You can't create value without good UX Entirely incorrect. Read the Lean Startup. Value creation is 100% possible without any UX or anything tangible that the customer "sees" at all. A delivery pizza place provides value. I call them, they deliver pizza. There's no "UX" there beyond what already existed (my phone, a working phone line). Too many people think the first thing that needs to be solved is how something lo…

> I call them, they deliver pizza. There's no "UX" there beyond what already existed (my phone, a working phone line).

Give me a moment to finish making my Picard face, here.

The entirety of pizza delivery is user experience.

- Answering the phone with clarity and promptness

- Taking an order with accuracy and clarity

- Creating a pizza that tastes good while matching the customer's order parameters

- Not giving people diarrhea

- Estimating a delivery timeframe

- Delivering the pizza within that timeframe

Botch any one of those things and the experience of ordering the pizza sucks. Botch several and people will stop ordering from that restaurant. Food, in particular, is possibly the largest user experience challenge outside of software. Maybe toolmaking is bigger. But food and restaurants are way up there.

Re: Design is Horseshit

#74

Post by fookyong »

martindale wrote: post #45

"I’ve created products / services in the past that have garnered praise for their design." ...you've also [wisely?] abandoned projects that had great promise without to due diligence necessary to hand them off to a willing steward (Sweetcron). I was pleased to see your domain here on HN, but I still have a bitter taste after being forced to abandon Sweetcron in favor of Chyrp. Regardless, I've been quite impressed by…

huh? it's open source - fork it, rename it, relaunch it. a dying project shouldn't be passed on like a baton, it should be evolved and improved by an enthusiastic developer who wants to make the project their own.

Can't blame me for no one wanting to fork Sweetcron.

Re: Design is Horseshit

#75

Post by lojack »

> 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.

Re: Design is Horseshit

#76

Post by SeoxyS »

The author of this post is so misguided it boggles the mind… I'm a developer, but I chose to study design in college rather than computer science, because in my opinion design is much harder to master than programming is, and can be a much greater catalyst to success than pure engineering alone can be.

I see design as an enabler. Engineering is where the heavy lifting is done, but design is what makes that possible. I hate to bring up Apple as an example, but when you look at, for example, Siri: voice recognition, understanding grammar and meaning within human sentences and the all technology behind it is fantastic engineering. But what differentiates Siri from anything else out there is the design. The fact that the AI has a personality, that it jokes around and does not feel like a machine, that's what makes it accessible to humans and what makes it so insanely great. And that's design.

I agree with the author to the extend that glossy buttons and a textured background does not a good product make. Indeed, there's a lot of good-looking crap out there—but that's not design, and the author's argument that that's what design is makes him look like an ignorant fool.

Re: Design is Horseshit

#77

Post by potatolicious »

tptacek wrote: post #16
mortenjorck wrote: post #12

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 a…

Do you disagree with this polemic? 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 shou…

I don't think the content of this post is the objectionable part per se. I suspect GP is just tired of these self-important flame wars plastered all over HN. These epic battles of egos, written in a tone that incites rather than argue, are getting very, very tiresome.

Android vs. iPhone. Devs vs. Designers. Tech founders vs. Non-tech founders. MBAs vs. CS. Instead of just arguing the merits of whatever point one has, it's become all too common to just lob ad hominem insults, call each other self-indulgent assholes, declare each others' views to be "horseshit", etc etc. It's grandiose posteuring and "witty" jabs disguised under a thin veneer of "legitimate discussion". It's like watching a pro wrestling match.

This is what I enjoy least about the startup community - and it certainly and obviously isn't contained to just HN. There's so much venom being spewed around for no good reason whatsoever. All of this mud-slinging is about as mature and informative as Kim Kardashian on TV.

It's like we can't communicate an opinion or belief without wrapping our entire egos into and making a spectacle out of it. Shit, I think I'd rather watch reality TV - they're about as nasty to each other as we are, but at least there's the off chance of ladies mud-wrestling.

Re: Design is Horseshit

#78

Post by fookyong »

fookyong wrote: post #70
yonasb wrote: post #55

Great post. The only thing I disagree with is your distaste for the designer fund. I think helping designers build startups is a good thing. And it's also important to note the difference between visual design (UI) and UX. You can't create value without good UX. And good designers do both UI and UX. So design is important, the visual aspect not so much, before you have something ppl want

You can't create value without good UX Entirely incorrect. Read the Lean Startup. Value creation is 100% possible without any UX or anything tangible that the customer "sees" at all. A delivery pizza place provides value. I call them, they deliver pizza. There's no "UX" there beyond what already existed (my phone, a working phone line). Too many people think the first thing that needs to be solved is how something lo…

danilocampos >

I think you have a fair point.

However it's important to remember that startups are out there to prove a core value proposition. Everything else, the UX on top of it - that can come later. After you've proven the core. It's all bullshit until then.

So say I'm starting a new pizza place. My value proposition: is pizzas in 10 minutes or less.

that is what I should be optimizing all my efforts around. if I can prove that people want and will pay for pizzas delivered in 10 minutes, even if they taste average, even if my phone etiquette is shitty, even if my delivery guys are smelly - then I know I have something as a startup. my core hypothesis has been proven correct.

then I can spend time working on the "UX" - the layers on top of that core that make the experience much more pleasant.

there are too many new startups obsessed with the layers and not with the core.

Re: Design is Horseshit

#79

Post by danilocampos »

vacri wrote: post #65
danilocampos wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(shrug) Words mean things. If I cry out, at the top of my lungs, that "Pizza is fucking bullshit!", then go on to say that I hate how pizza kills people, tears countries apart, and delivers atrocities, people will narrow their eyes and say "Actually, I think you're thinking of war." And then they're going to be a little weirded out that I said something so simultaneously bizarre and incorrect just to get their attent…

Pizza is a subset of war?

The competition of building a winning pizza business is as tiny a subset of war as is making pretty graphics a subset of design.

Design is a huge, varied, powerful thing. Design has moved the world forward, ever since the first human reasoned that he could make his stone tool n% more effective by adjusting it just so. Design brought us locomotives, bridges, precision tools, entire revolutions of industry.

In other words, conflating making things pretty with the enormous might of what humans do with the act of design is as silly as conflating pizza and war.

Life is just so much more interesting than that.

Re: Design is Horseshit

#80

Post by NormM »

fookyong wrote: post #50

Updated: 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 so…

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.
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