81–90 of 148 posts
Why is such a simple concept so hard for people to understand in practice?
Did I mention it's silly?
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…
This is exactly what design is.
There is huge value in being able to communicate problems visually that comes with the experience provided by being a designer early career.
Can anyone care to explain, what do you consider design? It's pretty amazing to see how a word can have different meaning for everyone and being debated.
Developers might respond that they created a great product that solves a problem without any designers. To that my reply is that you then you have designed as well.
Alright Captain Obvious. Design alone is horseshit. Engineering alone is horshit. Blogging alone is horseshit. Marketing alone is horseshit. But put these together in the right proportion and you get a beautiful product. The proportion depends on your product/service. It takes a lot less selling, if the visual design of the product is impressive. It releases dopamine in your customer's head which urges them to put th…
that last sentence 100% misses my point. you were right at the start: Engineering is also horseshit. You can have the most beautifully engineered solution to a problem that nobody has or is willing to pay to have solved, and you'll still have a bullshit startup. Marketing is also horseshit. You can have the most amazingly viral video for a product that nobody wants and you will still end up with 0 sales and long-term…
Design is not a pretty facade to a product, and designers aren't just responsible for aesthetics. Design is as much about how the product works as how it looks, and a designer worth their stock options understands that they aren't drawing pretty pictures of websites, they're designing with a purpose: to create an enjoyable experience and ultimately a functional, beautiful product that adds value to users lives.
I think he gets that. I think he sees the real tradeoff, between elegant, usable, pleasurable user experiences that in and of themselves make people want to come back to the product, and raw value creation. And he's saying, for early stage startups , raw value creation is more important no matter how clunky it is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only that, but his countering suggestion is a single word, "value", that he doesn't define or substantiate. Beyond any simple idea of what people want, you almost always need to build a product that they can use and like to use, and that needs good design. Not graphic design -- interaction design. Why so many of these content-less posts on HN front page lately?
value = solve a real problem there is always value in that