

Hiring a designer is a premature optimization - ttpva
http://tbbuck.com/hiring-a-designer-is-a-premature-optimization/

======
ekidd
Different markets have different design needs. Luxury consumer brands will be
different from enterprise products.

I know an entrepreneur who spent about $5,000 on professional branding for a
bootstrapped enterprise product. And the design _did_ look very professional
and creditable.

Two things went wrong:

1) He needed to build new landing pages, etc., on a regular basis, and these
rarely looked as professional as the basic branding. So despite spending a lot
of money, his site didn't look ultra-professional—at best, it looked
competent. And that's not good enough to justify $5,000 in a bootstrapped
startup.

2) He spent the $5,000 before proving that he could actually close sales.

In this case, I'd say that the $5,000 was spent prematurely. He could have
purchased a lower-cost logo and spent a day browsing themeforest, and he would
have wound up with something 80% as good for under $500. And that would have
been enough to start e-mailing his industry contacts and trying to get his
first sale. Getting that first sale was his biggest priority, because it would
prove he had a real business.

So before deciding whether to hire a designer, ask yourself: Is looking
professional the best use of your money right now? And what happens if you
need to change your sales pitch significantly, or even pivot? Does your
designer understand UX, advertising, copywriting, or do they just make logos
and stationary? Can you afford to keep paying them? How bad are your own
design skills?

------
incomethax
In my experience a designer isn't as much useful for simple designs or "look
and feel" so much as the design process helps you along product-market fit.
When my co-founder and I started building our company, we made sure we
followed the process of user-centric design and took wireframes and mockups
and photoshop files to our customers well before we even started coding.

We would have completely missed our market if we had just jumped into coding
before going after design. In that sense, I think if you don't have the
designer chops, hiring a designer to get the good looking
wireframes/mockups/etc to start doing customer validation is crucial -
probably even more so than the code.

~~~
jk8
I love your answer... Couple of questions. 1. When did you hire a designer for
your iOS app? 2. Was the designer involved in creating wireframes? 3. Are you
self funded? If not, then I think, hiring a designer would have been easy.

~~~
incomethax
We are self funded, we didn't hire a designer for our iOS app, rather for a
web-app that just went into public beta this past week.

Thus far we've funded ourselves out of client projects and a small grant we
received about a year and a half ago.

~~~
jk8
Thanks and good luck :)

------
endtwist
Bullshit of the highest order. If your only goal is to get a "pretty website"
when you hire a designer, not only will you hire the wrong person, but you
lose the benefits a good designer can provide. But sure, go ahead and buy that
$50 template.

Find someone with familiarity in building good UIs, designing a consistent
brand for your product, and making absolutely sure that your product's message
comes through clear as day.

~~~
mootothemax
_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.

~~~
chc
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.

~~~
nirvdrum
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 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.

~~~
chc
This is kind of what I'm talking about. There is some subset of usability
principles that you can "learn and scientifically derive" without actually
delving in and becoming a usability expert, but that just makes you the UX
equivalent of a cowboy coder hired because his uncle heard he knew computer
stuff — you might get stuff done, but you will not be a substitute for an
expert unless you actually become one.

~~~
nirvdrum
Well, on the other hand, I've grown weary of "UX" experts that think that
means just making things look pretty. The term HCI shouldn't be foreign to
them. Usability studies shouldn't just be grabbing three colleagues and asking
them what they think (few ever even get that far). There is a lot of
psychology that goes into usability. I'll take someone that studies that over
someone that only reads other usability blogs (i.e., an echo chamber) any day
of the week.

And again, I contend there are people that do both extraordinarily well. And
then there's a ton that think they can, on both sides of the fence.

------
mootothemax
Hi everyone, blog post author here.

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.

------
tuhin
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 not in the least way what design is about).

Similarly, then if I am a designer then I should just use free scripts that
let me make a social networking clone or delicious clone for my next project,
right?

~~~
nicksergeant
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 even
get an "MVP" running. If I asked some designer friends to go set up a server
to run Django, they probably wouldn't know where to start (though some would
hunker down and truly figure it out, they would be the exception).

My opinion is that "decent design" is easier to achieve than "decent
functionality". Don't get me wrong, I'm all for professional design and
appreciate every minute that goes into it - every single app I've built over
the past few years was started by an awesome designer (even my no-revenue side
projects).

For the developer, though, things like <http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap>
are helping us get _very_ far into an app without asking designers for favors
(or paying someone).

~~~
tuhin
FWIW I am fairly comfortable in setting up Django so despite that there are a
thousand things beyond the gettting it to run. Things like DB, hell even the
basic DB choice. For a current project I along with the developer (my brother)
realised that we were better off using MongoDB than use MySQL for our quick
random features in very near future.

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...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2963-what-happens-to-user-experience-
in-a-minimum-viable-product)

------
ja27
Professional designers are all about beating up any designer that does spec
work on sites like 99designs. They're freaking out (rightly so) about it
dropping the value of their work. Just like pro photographers are freaking
about microstock sites like iStockphoto and the serious pro-am photographer
that's happy to get $100 to shoot a wedding.

Take advantage of that.

------
gyardley
Hiring a contract designer is _never_ an optimization, whether you're
bootstrapping or neck-deep in venture capital.

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.

------
duopixel
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 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.

~~~
semanticist
Or you use the base styling to create whatever custom widgets you happen to
need. The kind of themes I'd use in this situation give you reusable UI
components and basic layouts that you can modify to your specific needs while
still retaining consistency across the app.

My experience has been that a bootstrapping startup cannot afford to keep a
designer on staff, and as a developer I'd much rather work with template
components that are designed to be reused and moved around than a fixed design
delivered by a contract designer that's not as flexible.

------
zaidf
All depends on what you consider a designer. In many ways, I think product guy
should know design--the full circle of it. I continue to see startups that
hire designers who believe design is a PSD sent to the team to be converted
and brought live. That is failure barring exceptional circumstances.

~~~
mattmanser
By the startup though, not the designer, he's just doing what he thought his
job was.

------
adeelk
This is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of “design”.

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.”

------
revorad
I don't understand why the OP is getting so much hate here. He is clearly
talking about a specific kind of situation - a solo programmer with little
money trying to build a web app - where design can be a costly overhead. It is
also clear that he's talking about design in the sense of making things look
beautiful, not in the sense of how things work.

Even more generally speaking, good visual design can be a powerful advantage
but it's by no means necessary, _especially on the web_. See Bingo Card
Creator, Visual Website Optimizer, Dropbox, Google, Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist,
etc.

------
thesash
Design is not just the way your product looks, it's how it works and how
people interact with it. Unless you're building something without a user
interface, design is a critical part of your product, and if you ignore it,
you're setting yourself up for failure.

You don't need to have a degree from art school to be a designer, just like
you dont need a CS degree to write code. You can learn the basic tenants of
typography, grid systems, and usability on your own. Whether or not you hire a
"designer," design thinking should be part of the process of product
development from day one.

------
trustfundbaby
Again with the absolutes ... in some cases this is true, in some cases it is
not ... if you're going into a market that's established and you want to make
a splash, do you think that going in with a theme forest page is going to get
you the buzz you need or get you laughed out of town?

It would be nice if you could always say ... x + y = z, but that isn't the way
the world works ... having a nice design out the gate can get you far enough
to be worth that extra $5k that you invest in it. It just depends.

------
hopeless
I agree. A professionally designed site would be ideal but it shouldn't be the
first thing you concentrate on. First prove the business, then sort out the
design.

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.

------
bignoggins
This may work for the web, but for mobile I would argue a good designer is as
important, if not more so, than a good developer. I'm speaking as a developer
who has realized this and hired a designer. Best business decision I've ever
made.

------
egze
I disagree. If you just focus on coding, you will miss key usability issues
that a good designer wouldn't miss.

In the end when you do hire a designer, you will have to rewrite a lot of your
code to fix these issues.

~~~
mootothemax
_I disagree. If you just focus on coding, you will miss key usability issues
that a good designer wouldn't miss._

And if you hire a UX expert, undoubtedly you'll gain even more insight into
usability. So what?

 _In the end when you do hire a designer, you will have to rewrite a lot of
your code to fix these issues._

Why? I thought separation of logic and design was a near universal practise by
now?

~~~
egze
Yes and no. By design I also mean interaction with the product, animations,
etc. Animations that you've written for the first design draft might not make
sense anymore with the new design. So new code required. So is for markup and
JS code. If new design requires new elements on the page, this may break your
JS that relies on certain structure.

~~~
nknight
Animations? Did I miss where every startup is now a game company?

Animations are an unnecessary complexity that get in the way far more often
than they enhance UX. If you're doing animation in a first-pass UI, you're
doing it wrong.

~~~
randomdata
> If you're doing animation in a first-pass UI, you're doing it wrong.

I have to disagree. If you are slapping in some animation eye candy after the
fact, you are doing it wrong.

Animation's purpose is to explain the environment to the user. An environment
void of animation has to use other metaphors to explain the surroundings,
leading to completely different designs. At that point it is difficult to
start to incorporate animation with real purpose.

It is not necessarily bad to design an interface without animations. Some
computer systems cannot easily support animations. However, animations can
give you some design liberties if animations are a core feature of your
design; to add them later is too late.

------
jk8
It makes sense when it comes to building web apps. I don't think it works when
you are building an iOS app. Is there a site which sells iOS app themes?

~~~
larrywright
I'm not sure I agree with that. Instapaper is very successful in spite of
having a fairly basic design (I seem to recall Marco saying he had never used
a designer). On that small of a form factor, I think usefulness trumps flashy
any day.

If you're doing a game, or something graphics-rich, that would be a different
story.

~~~
jk8
True that... It depends on the nature of the app and the audience.

------
earle
This makes no sense. A proper product lifecycle begins with design!

This is the fundamental reason why companies like Apple are so successful.

~~~
zaidf
_This makes no sense. A proper product lifecycle begins with design!_

I agree.

 _This is the fundamental reason why companies like Apple are so successful._

I don't think citing the _most_ extreme example helps your previous argument.
It'd be better if you could say company x is successful because of design and
yet company x's main specialty isn't design.

------
mattmanser
A lot of people disagreeing here, but let's face it, people are proving you
wrong every day. A generic design can get you a long way at the start.

Take Paras' visual website optimizer[1] as an example. Originally built using
simpla admin[2], you can still see a screenshot on his blog, it worked well,
he's now paid for a designer.

Perfectly good when he started out. Craig's list has also been mentioned.
There's a DNS service who's name escapes me that's had a god awful design for
ages but people rave about their customer service.

Design is a differentiator, not a must have. Would Google have won if they'd
have got a designer in?

The massive caveat is that you need to buy a template that is well written. If
you don't you're in for a lot of cleaning up work. That means that you must at
least be competent with html to inspect the source or be lucky.

To be honest Simpla Admin rocks and that intersection of the right look and
quality underlying html/css does take some hunting.

Even a brief glance is not enough, one of the themes I bought I ended up
spending a few hours rewriting bits of it because the performance sucked due
to overuse of cufon and jQuery. I wish I'd spent another 15 minutes checking
out the code as I ended up chopping up quite a bit of it.

[1] <http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/> [2]
[http://themeforest.net/item/simpla-admin-flexible-user-
frien...](http://themeforest.net/item/simpla-admin-flexible-user-friendly-
admin-skin/46073)

------
clistctrl
I have never heard of ThemeForest before, but this site looks absolutely
AMAZING! I feel i'm fairly capable of creating a design myself, but most of
the time It probably is not the best place to put my efforts. This looks like
a great way to get 70% of the effort done (only spending my time doing some
slight tweaks).

------
peteforde
This is fantastically bad advice, unless you're working on a weekend project
and don't care about traction.

I would counter that a simple concept executed with design thinking informing
the development is both practical and far more likely to succeed than yet
another random solo developer's SaaS.

The problem is that there's two issues at play: the visual theme elements and
the user experience. Sure, go ahead and buy a $14 theme if that gets you the
head start you need to start working on solving a real problem for someone.

Except that's where the hard work begins. It's not your ability to style INPUT
elements that is being tested, but your product vision and how people move
through a workflow that is easy to understand.

In the early days of a SaaS, design and copy are probably 75% of the hard work
in a MVP. Find me a successful startup that wishes they'd spend less energy on
design thinking and just written more code and I'll revisit my perspective.

Otherwise I'll make the statement that any idea which doesn't deserve the
attention of a design thinker is not likely to get off the ground because it's
statistically not solving a hair-on-fire problem anyhow. Put differently:
there's projects and there's start-ups. Start-ups are hard. If you're going to
start-up, your future users appreciate you thinking about how your product
makes them feel.

