
Designer Duds - dilap
https://medium.com/design-founders/f59c964513ef
======
jessep
This rings true for me. I studied product design in school, in a program run
by IDEO. David Kelley was my advisor. Yet, working in the web world, I don't
call myself a "designer". Why? Because I'm not focused on the visual.

The training we received is still the core of how I think about everything. It
was all about needfinding, methods for exploring the problem and solution
space, iterating with low cost mediums and moving to higher cost only as
needed for more information or production, things like that. Things that
relate to human needs, understanding them, and seeing how the things you make
relate to them.

Visual design was a minor part of the curriculum, we had a few art
requirements. But it wasn't the core.

It is sad that design means visual perfection and smooth animations. Design is
really about uncovering novel ways to improve people's lives, and doing so in
the simplest way possible. It doesn't necessarily even relate to interfaces.

~~~
ykumar6
If design is about "uncovering novel ways to improve people's lives", then the
biggest leaps tend to come from technology/software-driven solutions (vs
aesthetics)?

~~~
Terr_
> then the biggest leaps tend to come from technology/software-driven
> solutions

s/come from/utilize/

Generally, the tech side is one-level-removed. A lot of tech-work involves
providing for people... who interact with _other_ people who are experiencing
the "real" problems.

Don't get me wrong, it's valuable work (and boundaries can blur) but it's like
the difference between... a lawyer and a social worker. Or a bridge-builder
versus a traffic planner.

~~~
logn
That is if your tech is commoditized. For instance, you could argue surgeon
just needs to execute a series of well understood steps and be prepared for
various situations along with having the right technique. But there are also
surgeons who pioneer new breakthroughs and research new procedures. It seems
like a lot of apps aren't really breakthroughs technologically, so your point
is valid there, but that's not true for all apps or programmers... off the top
of my head... Shazam is an app that I think is tech-driven. One click to
recognize a song is a great design, but it didn't take a great designer to
make it (just great programmers).

~~~
Terr_
> But there are also surgeons who pioneer new breakthroughs and research new
> procedures.

I agree, but the key point in there is that _applying_ new tech often requires
significant domain-knowledge in whatever that other industry is.

Generally, this means _chains_ of people, rather than just one person who
happens to be both a professional programmer and professional <other thing>.

------
steven2012
In the last few years, we seemed to have completely thrown away everything
we're learned about UX and essentially made the same mistakes all over again.
I don't know what started this trend but it's frustrating.

For example, something as simple as the Google PDF viewer: it took me forever
to figure out how to save the file. There are no visual cues whatsoever to
tell you how to save the PDF. Maybe it's "cooler" but this is something that
you need to figure out to mouse over the bottom right corner and these buttons
magically appear. I thought we were done with stupid UX decisions like this
back in the 90s.

The same goes for Windows 8. I've been using Windows since 3.1, and I tried
using Windows 8 for a good hour, before I gave up. There are too many things
that are completely nonsensical and need explanation. It's enough to make me
switch away from Windows entirely. How this atrocity could have gone through
the entire Microsoft org without getting canned before launch is a testament
to how broken that company is.

The opposite is iOS. I really don't like using Mac OS (I wiped off Mac OS from
my company Mac laptop and installed Windows 7 on it to be more productive),
but iOS can be learned by an infant, I've seen it with my own eyes. That's a
testament to great design, because it's so intuitive that someone who wasn't
alive 18 months ago can figure out how to use it.

~~~
marknutter
It sounds a bit like you don't like learning new interfaces. That's not the
same thing as dealing with bad design.

~~~
toddmorey
I think his point is comparing how easy / intuitive each interface is to
learn. Besides, UI is supposed to be an aid not a puzzle.

~~~
nightski
Intuitive/easy to learn does not imply useful. Some times the most useful
things are the ones that have a high learning curve. It seems the tech
industry has decided that making things easy is more important than making
them useful.

~~~
brazzy
That's because it is when you want mass-market adoption.

And UX design is _only_ about making things easy to use. If they're not,the
design is an utter 100% failure.

------
aspir
> If Carousel is intended to solve a user problem, neither I nor other
> potential users seem to be able to figure out what it is.

> users don’t seem to be keen on replacing the main Facebook app

> a sufficiently vague target is harder to miss

The common thread between these products is that they are solutions in search
of problems. Great design can't help you find the "problem" to solve faster
than any other technique. This is a product/market fit article that just
happens to focus on design driven products.

~~~
null_ptr
Designers are good at refining existing products for mass consumption, it's
_engineers_ that come up with new, innovative products that solve real
problems. Expecting designers to be good engineers is insulting to both
professions.

~~~
aspir
> it's engineers that come up with new, innovative products that solve real
> problems

It's _humans_ that come up with new, innovative products that solve real
problems. The profession those humans choose vary.

------
pshin45
I was actually discussing this post a few days ago with one of my UI/UX
designer friends, and he made an interesting point - On news forums like
Hacker News we see a lot of failure stories from engineers and marketers about
how and why their product or marketing campaign failed, usually ending with
some lesson about product-market fit and understanding your users.

But my friend posed the question, Why don't more designers talk about their
design failures? For example, Julie Zhou (Director of Product Design at
Facebook) has written some awesome blog posts on Medium about her design
process, but what if she also wrote an essay about "Why Facebook Home Failed"?
What if Mike Matas (Design Lead for Facebook Paper) wrote an essay about "Why
so few people are using Facebook Paper"?

(I have no stats on the % of "failure stories" that are written by designers
vs engineers vs marketers, but anecdotally it seemed to ring true to me.)

So why is it that designers don't like talking about their failed designs? I
thought about it long and hard but couldn't think of a good reason why that
might be. Would love to hear your thoughts on the matter!

~~~
general_failure
Why talk about it and reduce their value in the market place?

I have hardly seen CEOs blog openly about their failures as well. It is career
suicide. There are very few people who would think of these writeups as some
sort of 'open' and 'honest' communication. And TBH, I think people do that
only if those people are already successful and this was some one-off.

------
tlb
In the examples (Carousel & Paper) the design isn't coming from the very top.
Instead, I suspect the designers were given requirements by non-designer PMs
and told to make it look nice. It works about as well as programmers being
given requirements by non-programmer PMs and told to make it maintainable.

I still don't know how much of that dysfunction is because creative people
can't do their best work without freedom, and how much is because the
briefs/specs are bad because they were made without deep understanding.

The ideal consumer software company has a great designer, a great programmer,
and a great instigator at the top.

~~~
sillysaurus3
It's hard to imagine Drew not caring about design, or not understanding the
things you've mentioned. Dropbox succeeded over other competitors mostly
because of its fantastic design and user experience. Is Dropbox simply so
large now that it's becoming just another typical big company with dysfunction
typical of big companies? If so, that's unfortunate. I wonder if YC could
amass some wisdom about how to stave off such problems after companies grow
really large.

Thanks for chiming in with an inside view, by the way.

~~~
tlb
It's not an inside view: I don't know more than what's reported in the media
about the process behind those products.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Oh, my apologies! I made the wrong assumptions based on how confident it
sounded.

------
jongala
Most startups fail; most apps don't succeed to the hopes or expectations of
their creators. Just because industry has started taking design seriously
doesn't mean we should suddenly expect most startups or apps succeed. And just
because Carousel, Paper, Square, Jelly, etc. are well designed, if they fail,
that is not a failure of Design itself.

To the extent that the executive-level _perception_ of design's contribution
to the success of an enterprise is important, then yes, for sure: we should
all make sure that the investments we make in design are substantive and
focused on supporting the overall utility of what we are doing, and don't
create a perception of wasted resources.

But he (to my mind) basically runs down and says that Carousel is mostly
redundant in the existing photo management marketplace and hasn't had good
traction; Paper is mostly redundant to Facebook's own existing app and can't
find traction; and Jelly is fundamentally off target in its premise and
doesn't have traction. The fact that all three had significant investments in
design, and tried to showcase that investment to users, does nothing to
implicate design in their failures or invalidate design's status as an
essential focus for businesses.

It's a thoughtful and interesting article, but after a first reading I just
don't think it holds up beyond the author's anxiety on behalf of the
discipline, and/or sense of missed opportunities for talented designers to
have some high profile hits.

------
cookiecaper
The issue is that engineering and design converge insofar as measurable,
quantitative data is available for a thing. Good UX is created by good
instrumentation that allows for rapid testing and analysis of the way people
use your interface as well as an unbiased knowledge of the history of UX. It's
not exceptionally likely that a random "designer" will have or understand
either of these things, and they're worthless if they don't. What's left for
the people who call themselves "designers" is really just fashion, and it
changes every few years, like all fashions.

Clarke's Third Law, that good technology is indistinguishable from magic, is
apropos in almost any discussion that touches on the osmosis between technical
staff and laymen. The laypeople have seen Apple's meteoric rise and heard it
attributed to "design", so they think they need a "designer". But Apple didn't
get where they are just by hiring random designers. They got where they are by
building an entire system that was centered around the vociferous pursuit of a
few simple principles. Apple is Apple because they've inextricably ingrained
these principles into the corporate DNA. Apple is Apple because they know that
"vision" is only a minor part in good industrial design, and because everyone
in the company is committed to developing products that exceed expectations
along all axes, through art, code, analytics, and other major disciplines.

Laypeople see Apple's attitude and success and think they just need to hire
another plucky, divisive guy with an artsy feel to replicate it. They don't
understand the work. To them, it's all magic, and anyone with a convincing
robe and wizard hat is equally competent.

------
harlanlewis
This (excellent, provoking, well-worth-reading) article was posted a week ago
on Quora ([https://mokriya.quora.com/Designer-Duds-Losing-Our-Seat-
at-t...](https://mokriya.quora.com/Designer-Duds-Losing-Our-Seat-at-the-
Table)), interesting that only the Medium version made it to Hacker News.

~~~
rspeer
If I saw (quora.com) next to a link, I would just skip over it.

Quora has managed to brand itself as a Q&A site where you can't read anything
unless you verify your identity three different ways (or remember the secret
code to type in the URL bar).

I see now that that's not what it is in this case, but I never would have
guessed that you could follow a link to quora.com and get publicly readable,
long-form blog content. I never even would have consciously thought about it.
It's like banner ad blindness; you learn not to see links that are likely to
annoy you.

~~~
onedev
You're being a bit dramatic don't you think? All you have to do to use Quora
is log in...

~~~
rspeer
Funny you should ask. I tried signing up for Quora once. I figured "Okay, they
really want me to sign up, and they say it takes 'seconds', so maybe this will
be better and more convenient overall."

It did not take "seconds". I forget what all the sign-up steps were, but there
were a lot of them. Eventually I decided this was way too much effort and
information for me to give a site I don't even like, so I left.

Weeks later, I tried to follow a link to Quora again, and it wouldn't let me
see _anything_ because it was redirecting me to a page that wanted me to
finish the sign-up process. I had to spend even more time convincing it to
forget I had ever linked it to my Google account.

------
pshin45
I really enjoyed this post and it reminds me of another related post from
several months ago that got a lot of attention in the design community:

[http://insideintercom.io/the-dribbblisation-of-
design/](http://insideintercom.io/the-dribbblisation-of-design/)

tl;dr - Good design is supposed to be about solving users' problems (not just
aesthetics), but recently design has become more and more about impressing
other designers with your snazzy new cutting-edge interface rather than
actually solving real user problems.

------
grey-area
This blog confounds popularity and quality.

If we were to judge news websites using the same metrics as he's using (users
in the marketplace) Yahoo! News, HuffingtonPost, and CNN are the epitome of
news reporting, which we should all aspire to and emulate.

The lesson from this article is that good design will not make you popular on
its own (if that is what you want), in fact it is mostly orthogonal to
popularity, just as quality content will not make you popular (on its own),
and is not really related to popularity, in fact in some cases quality content
will make it very, very hard to be popular (e.g. news). Of course these things
are valuable in their own right, and you might want to carve out a niche as a
quality provider of content for people who know all about x, at which point
you might even become popular _in spite of_ your quality content and quality
design.

Facebook is a terrible website in almost every way - the content is bad, the
design is worse (though improving) and yet it is very popular. Does that mean
we should step back and respect its design (awful), and content (worse) and
attempt to emulate them? Does that mean we should not strive for quality
content or quality design?

Of course design should be about producing solutions which work for your
customers, rather than producing things which appeal to other designers, and
UI is not the only thing involved - in that sense some of his criticisms are
well aimed. Paper is interesting because it may be beautifully designed, but
it has been designed for the wrong sort of content - it would work far better
as the app for say medium than an app for FB content. But I think its unfair
to judge it entirely by monetary success or numbers of downloads - if that is
your _sole criteria_ for success, then you may as well give up on good design,
good content, because the majority of people don't want quality, they want
quantity, they want pictures (doesn't matter how bad), they want regular
stimulation, and sensational stories (true or false, doesn't really matter).

Number of downloads/views is not a good metric for quality or success (unless
you mean purely monetary success). By this metric the best things in the world
are FB, Angry Birds, and Yahoo News. For many people, success is not
measurable purely in downloads or money raised, success is making a _good_
product, not a _popular_ product.

~~~
adammichaelc
"If we were to judge news websites using the same metrics as he's using (users
in the marketplace) Yahoo! News, HuffingtonPost, and CNN are the epitome of
news reporting, which we should all aspire to and emulate."

This is a straw man.

The author never argues for popularity; he argues that design should be using
its seat at the table to produce better outcomes for users and for businesses.
Other than users deciding to use a product, what other metric is there for
whether you have _built something people want._

re Facebook Paper: "But I think its unfair to judge it entirely by monetary
success or numbers of downloads - if that is your sole criteria for success,
then you may as well give up on good design, good content, because the
majority of people don't want quality"

If we were talking about an app being launched by an indie dev in his garage,
maybe you'd be right - _maybe_. We're talking about an app launched by
Facebook.... they have essentially unlimited resources. They have some of the
stickiest content on the planet, coupled with an unlimited marketing budget, a
big launch, etc. and yet Paper was a flop.

They didn't design something for their users, they didn't solve a problem;
instead, they did a neato experiment that didn't create a valuable outcome.

~~~
grey-area
_The author never argues for popularity; he argues that design should be using
its seat at the table to produce better outcomes for users and for
businesses._

The author and your comment do implicitly use popularity as the measure of
success, which I think is dangerous:

 _That’s probably because no one is downloading it_

 _Other than users deciding to use a product, what other metric is there for
whether you have built something people want._

Better outcomes for users and businesses depend very much on your definition
of better, which might range from making more money out of users to helping
users get what they want even it if doesn't make money. There's a huge range
of potential outcomes which different people might judge to be good, let's not
pretend that there is one objective outcome which equals better/success/good
or that it is strictly linked with making something people think they want
right now. You can also make something they will want in one year, or
something they will want when everyone else wants it too, or something only a
few want but which you feel everyone might want if only they are exposed to it
in the right way.

You can certainly argue that Paper fails to appeal to its intended audience,
or deal with the content they have, rather than the content they'd like to
have, but part of delivering a successful product is shaping what your users
want by delivering something you consider valuable, not entirely pandering to
their existing expectations or taste. e.g. iphones vs existing phones, ipod
versus CD players etc. so I imagine that was the motivation for it. The trap
that FB finds itself in is that they have grown massive by pandering to the
lowest common denominator, and now cannot escape that. Sticky content they may
have, but how much of it is worth the pixels?

The article and your comment here are sliding from 'better outcomes' to
'number of downloads/users/views/likes' as a definition of better - there are
other definitions of better/success/good and some of them even make money (see
Apple's attitude to design under Jobs). Things which are popular in a given
era are rarely considered good or valuable in the long-term - popularity is an
ephemeral and misleading measure of quality if you look at writing, design,
art or any other creative field.

~~~
mattmanser
Success is measured by the original aim. This is exactly what the article is
talking about, designers making something while forgetting the original aim,
focusing on the wrong thing.

If I make something with the intention to sell it and try to sell it with a
huge marketing budget and it doesn't sell, it's a failure.

These things have seemingly got _no_ penetration. They didn't even hit a
niche.

How is that anything other than complete failure?

You seem to be redefining the meaning of success to be how pretty it is which
is precisely the problem the author is tackling:

 _In order to avoid losing its place atop organizations, design must deliver
results...A “great” design which produces bad outcomes —low engagement, little
utility, few downloads, indifference on the part of the target market— should
be regarded as a failure._

------
yanghu
The failure of these products is not solely the designer's fault. Designer
only takes one seat at the table, not all of them.

A successful product requires great work from all aspects, insightful business
person, great engineer, great design, great marketing and operations. Good
products are so rare because all the them have to work out together. Good
design can help gain more users, but it alone is not sufficient for the
product to be sufficient. If a well-designed app failed, it could be caused by
any of the aspects. And maybe because well-designed apps gain so much
attention within the designers' community, it is far more noticeable than
other types of failures. A product with perfect engineering solution, or with
a perfect marketing plan, will possibly fail as well if the design is bad, but
the designer community probably don't talk about that.

Although nowadays product designers are expected to take care of more aspects
than just the visual design, the overall work is not one man's job. Path's
failure is not because the design is bad, but rather something else. Maybe how
the marketing people marketed it. Maybe how the business people directed the
product. It's nothing wrong to perfect the design details, but it still cannot
guarantee a success.

That being said, I think this is a good article and while I'm reading it I'm
already rethinking the approaches I'm taking to products.

------
dsirijus
A bit tangential, but there's an interesting field of design called _game
design_.

In a company with clear responsibility division, game designer is not
responsible for making things look pretty at all - the art director is.
Instead, his focus is fully on core utility of game - fun. Inventing it,
testing it, tweaking it, data-driving it.

I think many designers in other fields would benefit greatly from taking a jab
at a small game prototype.

From history-defining classics like Pong and Breakout to iPhone, iPad -
coincidence? Doubt it.

------
shanacarp
I'm still trying to figure out why Web and digital design in general seems to
have abandoned high modernism. Many of the problems with the design mentioned
have to do with this abandonment.

I really feel we need a new Bauhaus school for digital objects. Or at least
another Loos running around yelling about ornamentation interactions are
crimes (
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime))

~~~
punee
I'm not sure it's abandonment as much as a huge cognitive dissonance.
Designers are always using that Steve Jobs quote about how design is "not how
it looks, it's how it works", and the Dieter Rams principles, all of which are
fairly functionalist. It's kind of puzzling, really.

------
gdubs
If design only goes skin deep, then it's superficial and not really design.
Design isn't just about aesthetics or making things shiny, though it often is.
That some or even many companies misinterpret what it means to be design-
driven, or fail to do it right, doesn't say anything about the value of a true
design-driven process.

------
speeder
I studied Game Design (in Brazil to take that course you must also learn
product design in general), and I am a HORRIBLE artist.

And I get depressed every time someone call the artist on my team the
designer.

No damnit, I am the designer (and the coder), I design stuff, I don't make the
art of the stuff, I design how they work, how they should behave, how the user
interacts, and I code that, and the artist make it pretty.

On my own country this is even worse, designer has no clear direct
translation, AND sounds analogue to "desenho" ("desenho" in portuguese means
"drawing" in english), so when I say I am a designer lots of people think I do
"desenhos" (drawings), what I do now is call my profession in portuguese
"projetista" (in english it would mean something like "guy that do projects")
so that is clear to people what I do.

~~~
Mithaldu
Maybe start using architect? :)

~~~
speeder
I had that as formal title once ("Solutions Architect") and people kept
assuming I was a building architect (here in Brazil at least building
architect is the guy that make the art of the building, the rest is still
mostly up to the engineer).

------
BornInTheUSSR
Design needs to be baked in, not slapped on -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Rams#Dieter_Rams:_ten_pr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Rams#Dieter_Rams:_ten_principles_for_good_design)

~~~
001sky
This seems to be perhaps the fate...like 'digital media' or 'social media'
expertise 10 years ago was a thing...now its just baked in. 10 years ago,
design was not really a 'thing'...it was brought to prominence but it's
perhaps best not thought of as a corporate function like HR or Finance. It's
best thought of as part of the DNA of the product/engineering teams working
together.

~~~
anentropic
"10 years ago, design was not really a 'thing'"

how old are you?

~~~
TillE
This is HN, so I think you have to add "on the web" to the end of every
sentence.

------
epayne
While I generally agree with the direction of this article, I think the author
is not rigorous enough.

I think the author conflates multiple types of design with each other (product
design, industrial design, systems/solution design, service design, visual
design, interaction design, user experience design) and then proceeds to
conflate the success of each one with the other while mostly focusing on
interaction and visual design throughout the article. Second I think the
author conflates the success of "design" with the success of Square which is a
big mistake because if you really study Square's success it is a fantastic
case study for the success of design. AFAIK Intuit launched a similar product
and service with a single UX designer on a large dedicated staff well before
Square launched. Square's intense focus on design trounced Intuit with a
product and service based at least partially on superior design and UX. I
think the author also slips his assumptions past the audience at the beginning
of the article stating that design has won it's “a seat at the table” which is
highly contextual and in general may still be less true than the author makes
the case for. While design may not be batting last anymore it most certainly
almost never bats first.

In my opinion Daniel Rosenberg offers a more scathing and valuable critique of
today's design scene in his IXDA 2014 talk "The De-intellectualization of
Design" [1]. I highly suggest that if you are interested in this topic that
you pay attention to what he states in that talk.

[1] [http://interaction14.ixda.org/program/friday/517-the-de-
inte...](http://interaction14.ixda.org/program/friday/517-the-de-
intellectualization-of-design)

------
mrxd
I feel that beneath the surface, this is a poorly reasoned article that only
works if you are confused about the difference between visual design and
product design. Which is weird because the author makes a point of
distinguishing the two.

His confusion probably stems from the assumption that great visual designers
will become or should become great product designers. He's seeing beautiful
products fail, and worried because the visual designers weren't solving
important problems for users. But why would they be? They're visual designers.

His way of evaluating design doesn't make a lot of sense either. Facebook may
be fine with Paper's performance if it is intended as a platform where they
can experiment without disrupting the experience for most users. Carousel's
engagement numbers probably have less to do with the design than the fact that
it's hard to get users off of other photo management apps that they already
use.

------
ahmadss
I've found that sometimes its hard to figure out what to test when you are
seeking user-centered validation, and then, as a byproduct of having a hard
time figuring out what to test, the tendency is to simply put your head down,
avoid testing, irrationally fear user feedback, and then focus on pushing to
production.

The plan then turns into "I'll test once it's live, once I have actual usage
data". But, testing never occurs, and instead, your product team is faced with
scope creep. You (or your stakeholders) think that a product is failing
because you haven't jammed enough into it already, so go ahead and jam more
features into it. Build all the things!

The cycle then repeats until the product is pronounced dead. sometimes on
arrival, sometimes many months or years later.

So, the sooner product creators, designers, and developers let go of the fear
of testing, the sooner a team can arrive at a product market fit.

------
pron
Reading this very interesting article, I had another thought, completely
unrelated to design. What if the average consumer can't or just doesn't want
to reimagine so many things at once? What if we can't have so many
revolutions?

Consumer apps are already competing with one another -- even if they are
addressing completely different domains -- for mindshare, simply because there
are just so many things we can get our heads around. What if products that
seek to revolutionize something make the problem worse, because we can only
revolutionize a very small number of things at once?

Maybe Silicon Valley should come to terms with the idea that changing the
world takes a great many tiny, tiny steps, and change does come but at an
infuriatingly slow pace, because that's how _we 're_ built?

------
onedev
This is a much needed wake up call for everyone, as we've started to go down
the rabbit hole that the post describes. It was articulated in a clear way
with tons of concrete examples. I think we'll be looking back at this piece in
a few years.

------
marcosdumay
Well, guess what, development were once viewed as a useless hobby, then the
cure for all problems, then as a problematic profession that didn't deliver
what was expected (because it didn't cure all problems), and then finally got
in a place where most people know what to expect.

In fact, I guess most professions followed that exact sequence. Design is kind
of an outlier, because it found its place several times, but people keep
forgetting where it is. I think that's due to people neglecting it during bad
times, that often last enough for forgetting.

Anyway, welcome to a new iteration.

------
dfuego
Many (smart) people continue thinking of Design as "how it looks" and not "how
it works". Pretty animations and slick frames is not what matter, but what
problem are you solving and how.

------
ChrisNorstrom
We're in the middle of "Over-Design". The carousels, slideshows, parallax
scrolling effects, top screen loading bars, javascript animations,
checkerboard image and text lists are all signs of designers who are trying to
fit design in places where its not needed. They're shoe-horning design into
pages where the content doesn't even call for it. I think this is because what
designers secretly want (being creative and clever) and what users want
(simple and working) are starting to mismatch.

------
LiweiZ
I think it's more related to information architecture. I guess a true
industrial designer (in this context, UI/UX designer), should be very aware of
the importance of IA for a product as a whole. Too many eye candies in
industrial designer world. That's why top players in this field are so
valuable. Bringing fusion of aesthetics and functions to the table always
gives you the edge. It's just too difficult for most of us to achieve that.

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DanBC
One thing not mentioned is the curious phenomena of a designer creating a blog
to talk about design, and then using terrible design choices which make the
blog unreadable to most people. Things like weird fonts, or very thin fonts,
or either too high contrast (thin black fonts on white background) or very low
contrast (light grey on white).

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zan2434
The Path->bucket analogy is pretty interesting. Where else are more
comfortable buckets being built instead of plumbing?

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pteredactyl
Design, in general, is an approach to problem solving. Often conflated with
visual or graphic design.

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applecore
_X for the bourgeoisie_ sounds like an interesting way to notice new startup
ideas.

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brians
Carousel is backed by a huge storage array, and automatically backs up every
picture. The author seems to have missed the critical elements of how it
works!

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desigooner
For what it's worth, the Flickr app now automatically backs up every picture;
so do Picturelife & OneDrive. They all are backed by a storage array that is
quite a bit economical when compared to Dropbox's current rates.

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Mithaldu
I find this claim fairly annoying, since the free Flickr service only allows
me retrieve my photos in a very down-sized format. Or did they change that in
the past few years?

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samastur
I don't know, but unless your photo collection is really small (few GB) you'll
quickly have to pay for its Dropbox storage at which point Flickr will be much
cheaper (25$ unlimited per year).

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hagbardgroup
Look! Design is fantastic. Organizations that take design seriously make
products far better than those that don't. We should applaud and defend the
companies that take it seriously, because they're all that's left in this
country between something worthwhile and third world mediocrity. Paul Graham
said it best in his New York Times interview last year:

>“If there’s not going to be another Google,” Graham said, “then we’re so
deeply screwed that we all should be getting bags of silver and shotguns.”

Praise God and pass the ammunition, brother.

The problems in the startup ecosystem are outside the control of entrepreneurs
and employees -- it's related to monetary policy and political dysfunction.
Problems in VC, downstream from even larger problems in legacy political
structures. That political decisions made free $$$$ available to investors to
shove $$$ towards useless products to pay $$ to employees to create such
useless products is not the fault of the people at the bottom of that stream.

Blaming the little guy is trivial. Blaming the big guys (many of whom have
been dead for a century) is not as cathartic or as risk-free.

