

Ask HN: Technical, Business, or Designer - lachyg

Hey HN,<p>So I was thinking today, why does it seem that the equation is always technical &#62; business/marketing. Why is designer never a part of this equation for a startup founding team.<p>Especially looking at Apple, designers are the core of their business.<p>Interested in the discussion...<p>EDIT: To clarify, design means product and user interface design.
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dhh
In my humble opinion, it's much more important to have a stellar product
designer (decide how the thing works, then how it looks) than it is to have a
stellar programmer.

The slight problem is that programmers generally have an easier time making a
shitty-but-workable UI than designers have putting together shitty-but-
workable code.

Thankfully that has been changing lately. I've talked to plenty of Rails
developers who come from a design background and are teaching themselves how
to program. Hell, that's how I originally met Jason Fried. He had taught
himself to program and wanted some assistance.

So if I was putting my money on any startups (and I'm not!), I would much
rather pick the ones with strong design talent than with strong programming
talent -- unless the key element to what they were doing was uniquely
technical.

~~~
hsuresh
Design, in the sense you mention here, is something i would expect a good
programmer to be good at. It is about problem solving, as well as
understanding users of the solution. Designing a solution also requires a bit
of algorithmic thinking. I have seen very few non-programmer designers who
were good at designing a solution/application.

~~~
dhh
You might expect that, but my sense from the real world is that it is not
true. I consider myself pretty good at this stuff and I'm still humbled by the
insights of our designers.

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tomhoward
It's probably helpful to distinguish between designer in the _visual design_
or _graphic design_ sense, and in the _product maker_ sense.

A strong sense of design is a crucial attribute in any product maker, which
would generally include every member of a startup's founding team, whether
technical or business/marketing.

It's less important to have a visual/graphic designer in the founding team,
and most startups outsource this type of work until they're big enough to
warrant a dedicated resource.

It's worth noting that in the AirBnB founding team, Brian and Joe are both
industrial designers, with Nate the only hacker.

~~~
lachyg
When saying designer, I mean a really strong product design, but also someone
that can make things look nice. Someone that's highly skilled, not just
someone who can navigate photoshop.

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Neputys
Partially the problem is in the word it self. As you can see from the
discussion here and in many other places, as soon as someone asks similar
question people start talking about what this word (designer) actually means.

Take architecture for example. In a way it's about designing buildings, but
they have a separate term for it. You say it and everyone knows what you mean.

This is whats missing here I think. Some designers think only about "visual
appeal" and can be even dangerous for a startup, because they don't know or
often care about what it is they are actually building. Some are letter "T"
people - they know one thing very very well and are more or less familiar with
related fields. For them "design is how stuff works" (from your question Apple
type designers). This kind of person can add a huge value to any business but
we don't have a name for them (hopefully yet).

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jcoop
Great question.

It does seem that the tech-world lags behind in terms of the role of the
designer, when compared with that of Industrial Design for example.

Take IDEO. An Industrial Design consultancy at heart who over the last 10
years have evolved into a consultancy that focus's more broadly on innovation,
design thinking, strategy and designing businesses.

Whereas once upon a time an Industrial Designer's job would be to 'skin' a
product and bridge the gap between marketing and engineering. The Industrial
Designers role at leading design focused now companies now play a more
prominent part in the development of business. Providing a divergent-thought
design led process to tackle problems surrounding the product and service.

Web designers are yet to take take this step. And for the most part focus on
the designing of pixels as opposed to the designing of businesses.

Andrew Chen breaks down IDEO's philosophy of human led design in which they
argue that there's 3 perspectives when developing a service, which for me
really sums up the true value a design-founder can hold. That of Viability,
Feasibility and Desirability. In which:

Viability = Business focus (marketing, finance) Feasibility = Engineering
focus (technologies, agile etc.) Desirability = Design focus (customers,
aesthetics, etc.)

IDEO design from a desirability focus which means that the user comes first,
everything is done from their eyes with a keen focus on usability and
aesthetics in result creating a product that is highly revelvant and desirable
to the user.

It's a great article, read more here:
[http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/12/04/does-every-startup-
need...](http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/12/04/does-every-startup-need-a-steve-
jobs/)

I think more and more in the tech-world are starting to realise this, both
designers and non-designers. Just look at the current opportunities for UX
guys.

But in my opinion what we really need is more design founders and encourage
more designers to spend less time on dribbble.com and more time studying the
in's and out's of business.

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turph
Bit of a tangent here...

As a UI designer I find comments to these types of questions always a bit
interesting. Don't get me wrong, I am happy to see folks thinking about the
inclusion of design input initially. But what I find kinda amusing is that
there is this tendency to quickly begin classifying designers (rightly so into
visual & workflow), but the same discussion never happens for the term
technical.

Your question simply says technical, and the community just accepts the term.
I have work with many "technicals" who could code a front end but their work
failed because they knew nothing about latency, back end architecture or
scaling. And I have worked with many back end technical folks who felt the
display layer was the work of junior people as it is not "the hard stuff".
Like designers, technical folks fall into two camps as well - and very few
excel at both.

Not looking to start a discussion war. Just want to state that the more legs
you can put under your idea, the more balanced it will be. Apple succeeds for
many reasons, but one thing is true - they have the culture and more
importantly the infrastructure to assemble a large team of highly talented and
focused individuals.

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paraschopra
I don't think design can be decoupled from "technical" part. All great
software companies have designers and programmers working closely in a tightly
knit team.

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bobf
I don't know that I agree with your assessment that "designers are the core"
of Apple's business, but even so, Apple's current state seems to be rather
irrelevant to a discussion about a combination of founders for a startup.
Wouldn't looking at Apple's structure when they were a startup be more useful?

Aside from that, there are a lot of founders who have some level of design
skills -- they just also happen to do other things, since that's how startups
work. When you have limited resources, having a dedicated designer is
generally going to be inefficient (unless design/UX are crucial to your
particular startup in the early stages).

Also, non-designer founders have a lot of options regarding design -- they can
outsource it, find/use a template, hack together some html/css, etc.

~~~
jcoop
I disagree.

A designer is an individual that solves problems by the use of a divergent-
thought led process (A process very different to that of an engineer or MBA).
They find problems, and solve them. Since solving a problem is the very
pinnacle of building a business, I disagree with you that your claim that a
designer is going to be useless.

It seems within the Tech-World the role of the designer is skewed, to the
point even designers believe that their only role is to deal with the pixels
on the screen. Take a look at leading design consultancies, such as IDEO, frog
and Continuum and then try and tell me that a designer's role within a start-
up is 'inefficient'.

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apz
As a designer and a newcomer to the bay and valley I find this thread
incredibly refreshing. I came to the bay to do exactly the kind of design
described here: larger picture problem solving, going beyond what something
looks like to connect aesthetics and communications more meaningfully with
core functionality and belief.

But so far I've found that virtually no part of process of starting and
running a company currently allows for this ki d of design thinking. There is
only ever a design budget for what amounts to a fresh coat of paint, way after
all the meaningful design decisions have been made.

How can design become a more meaningful part of the process?

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nayanshah
Design sense is definitely a must for everyone. Every programmer needs to
spend atleast some time figuring out the cleanest interface (UI/API) for their
code. Once a usable product is created, only then professional designer is
need to make the product sell.

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paolomaffei
because "technical" encloses both "programming" and "design" (which by the way
I don't think is as strategic as "Interaction Design") in the same way that
"business" encloses "organization", "marketing" and "sales" (and possibly much
more)

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lachyg
Technical encloses design? I always thought it was just the programming. By
design, I mean product and user interface design.

~~~
pluies
> Technical encloses design?

By "design" at Apple, they mean "how the product work" — I think Jonathan Ive
is to credit for that sentence. And Jonathan Ive is an industrial designer:
he's not just here to make things look cute, he's there to make sure a product
works well and is enjoyable to use.

In a start-up, especially a software one, "how the product work" is
responsibility of the developer(s).

~~~
lachyg
But to the best of my knowledge, he doesn't engineer the insides of the
products. He doesn't work out how the scroll wheel will actually make song
skip, or pause, or play.

He works out how it will look, how we will interact with it, how it will be
presented, and why. [I'm generalising and condensing though

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kingsidharth
Designers, for apple, are part of technical team.

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lachyg
Please excuse the terminology I used, I'm referring to programmers as the
technical people.

