Visual design will not fix your broken business
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Re: Visual design will not fix your broken business
#2This is an extremely important point to understand.
Visual aesthetics is about optimizing not about fundamentally solving business problems.
Of course you need something that is not completely impossible to look at but obviously the world is filled with less than pleasing visual solutions on very successful businesses.
If you are dealing with designers as customers you obviously need to prioritize the visual aspect. And visual design can be used in saturated markets to become the preffered choice but it can also work against you.
All businesses must figure out to what extent design is important for their success not just assume that it will help.
Re: Visual design will not fix your broken business
#3> I am concerned that “I am looking for a design co-founder” will become the new “I am looking for a technical co-founder.”
This is essentially what the article boils down to and I think the fear is unfounded. Even the greenest wantrepreneur realizes that you need an engineer to build their awesome idea. The fact that some might focus on designer as well is just one of a million suboptimal decisions a founder might make.
At the end of the day, it's just like everything else in early-stage life: you need to make the most of the resources you have. If you can get an amazing designer on board then by all means go for it, if not grab a copy of bootstrap, try to develop a modicum of taste and take a look at archive.org to remind yourself that successful startups that had bangin visuals off the gate are the exception not the rule.
Re: Visual design will not fix your broken business
#4> I am concerned that “I am looking for a design co-founder” will become the new “I am looking for a technical co-founder.” This is essentially what the article boils down to and I think the fear is unfounded. Even the greenest wantrepreneur realizes that you need an engineer to build their awesome idea. The fact that some might focus on designer as well is just one of a million suboptimal decisions a founder might m…
I think it really depends on what you are doing. Making it look good is the easy part, making it work is something completely different.
There are plenty of designer who can design beautifully illustrated landing pages but that can't design a product to save their lives.
If treated without some sort of caution all you will increase the risk of producing beautiful products that don't work.
Re: Visual design will not fix your broken business
#5What I think many programmers miss with "visual design" is that the mere "pixels" are the user interface. They are one the most important parts of an app. Done right they should make an app both easier to learn and more efficient to use. Conversely, it is true that design that over focuses on form at the expense of function can make for a bad user experience indeed. I'm neither a designer or programmer, but I rely on software to make my living, and the difference in quality between apps that have apparent feature parity is vast base on their UI.
Re: Visual design will not fix your broken business
#6I agree with the author's central point, although I don't know if I would de-emphasize the importance of the visual designer to such an extent. I think a couple of the examples he links to (Google, Facebook) are outliers. They succeeded in spite of their lack of visual design because their products weren't just executed well; they were executed extremely well. Generally speaking though it takes a bit more finesse in order to make your users feel at home using your product.
With that said, I agree that if the core product isn't well engineered then no amount of lipstick on the pig is going to make it usable. You can paint rust any color you like but it's still rust.
Re: Visual design will not fix your broken business
#7This is an extremely important point to understand. Visual aesthetics is about optimizing not about fundamentally solving business problems. Of course you need something that is not completely impossible to look at but obviously the world is filled with less than pleasing visual solutions on very successful businesses. If you are dealing with designers as customers you obviously need to prioritize the visual aspect.…
The point about visual aesthetics may be true, but that's only a part of what a graphic designer does: a good graphic designer will solve communication problems, and that is definitely a business problem worth solving well.
Re: Visual design will not fix your broken business
#8This is an extremely important point to understand. Visual aesthetics is about optimizing not about fundamentally solving business problems. Of course you need something that is not completely impossible to look at but obviously the world is filled with less than pleasing visual solutions on very successful businesses. If you are dealing with designers as customers you obviously need to prioritize the visual aspect.…
The point about visual aesthetics may be true, but that's only a part of what a graphic designer does: a good graphic designer will solve communication problems, and that is definitely a business problem worth solving well.
Yes but communication problems are primarily existing pre-sales and some people are very good at that.
Designing the actual interface/service/functionality/product is a different problem all together.
Re: Visual design will not fix your broken business
#9Good design is a strong component for your startup's success today. unlike some 10-15 years ago, users now have high expectations for your product design- thanks to the likes of Apple- and I see this is where inexperienced people get stuck- After it looks like Apple's, What next?
Re: Visual design will not fix your broken business
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point about visual aesthetics may be true, but that's only a part of what a graphic designer does: a good graphic designer will solve communication problems, and that is definitely a business problem worth solving well.
Yes but communication problems are primarily existing pre-sales and some people are very good at that. Designing the actual interface/service/functionality/product is a different problem all together.
Maybe the term "communication problem" isn't the best. A better one might be usability, or interaction design. Good design has heaps of it. And it's not aesthetics alone. A designer should go a lot further - scope includes accesibility and (if you're unlucky enough to work with me) information architecture/design.
Knowing how a colour wheel works doesn't solve problems like a custom-designed, ticked-out über-awesome CSS -based drop-down list that doesn't respond to keypresses.
Knowing when to use search, and when to use tags, or how to group search results in a way that makes sense to the use context is worth paying a lot more for than just coming up with a cool UI concept.
TLDR - this blog post is bang on the bucks.