UX Rockstar or Programming Rockstar?

[colinsidoti]

This was the premise for a new blog post, but nobody reads my blog and I'm interested in other peoples opinions.

Consider you're working on a new web startup. You need to hire one designer and one programmer. You have four applications and each candidate is completely devoted your product, 2 are rockstars and 2 are average. Due to budget limitations, you can only take one rockstar. Which do you take, the UX rockstar or the programming rockstar?

[zbruhnke]

Definitely programmer. An average designer and a "rockstar" programmer (if he is truly a rockstar programmer) can make a web startup significantly better than what a great UX designer and average programmer can do. UX is important but almost without a doubt your UX will evolve over time and the one used in the beginning will almost never stand the test of time (hopefully the technology behind it will for the most part). Obviously you dont want terrible usability but overall if you have great usability and buggy applications then you will not succeed in the end anyway.

[colinsidoti → zbruhnke]

What about Twitter? If this is true, shouldn't the "fail whale" have plagued the company years ago?

[zbruhnke → colinsidoti]

A valid argument, but one that i would suggest is only because of a lack of competition, similar to the facebook/myspace/friendster battle I think if it were early enough someone could still have come along and ousted twitter with a more reliable site. That said, it certainly never came true. As with any rule I believe this one has exceptions to it, but in the end I think my advice holds true for most startups even if it does not for all.

[colinsidoti → zbruhnke]

Interesting, I would actually take the opposite approach. When it comes to startups, I don't think rockstar programming is really enough to set a company apart. While the company is small some bad code shouldn't send it to the grave. Code is invisible; the users will never see it and as long as it works it shouldn't matter if it's elegant object-oriented programming or unorganized "spaghetti" code. If a programmer is truly committed to the project, they will make it work and that should be all that matters.

The user experience however, needs to be excellent from the start. A startup may pick up some early, tech-savvy adopters if there is a very cool technology, but with a poor user experience the general population will never adopt the new technology.

That said, your point about the UX needing to evolve is well-taken. Do you think users preferred Facebook over MySpace because of its programming or because of its user experience?

[zbruhnke → colinsidoti]

"Do you think users preferred Facebook over MySpace because of its programming or because of its user experience?" I think it was a combination of the two, but that is my whole point to start with. As someone who was a member of facebook when it was still "thefacebook" if you remember in the beginning the UX was very basic, people flocked to it because of its exclusivity to an extent and they stayed (at least in my opinion) because they weren't having the constant downtime they were used to experiencing with a site like "friendster". Facebook was the site that people stayed on because it was fun "facebook stalking" became a hobby for many, that had much less to do with the UX then most people would lead you to believe. My basic point is that while a good UX is a necessity in the beginning a great one is not, because your users will demand what they want in usability. But with a faulty system or code that is constantly being chopped and hacked the growth of your system and frequent downtime for fixes could very well be your downfall.

EDIT: I would also like to say that I do NOT think your "code is invisible" statement really holds true. Good code is elegant in itself, it allows for subtle flaws to be hidden, and neat little tricks that a good hacker can make happen is what excites users and makes them come back for more, even if they don't know it is code doing it, they can see it and it does make a diffrence. (at least in my opinion)

[nextparadigms]

It depends on the complexity and difficulty of your app. If it's very difficult to create then get the rockstar programmer with hopefully some average UX skills.

If your app is not that complicated to make and intuitiveness matters a lot than get the UX guy.

When you refer to UX guy do you mean he's a designer? Can't you give the programmer instructions for the UI? For example, I'm great with UX but I'm neither a designer, nor a programmer. I'm a perfectionist and I want the products to be as easy to use as possible, or to look very good.

[colinsidoti → nextparadigms]

Yes sorry, the UX guy makes the product easy to use and look good.

[bitsm]

Since I consider myself a UI/UX designer, this surprised me, but I'm gonna say hire the programmer.

Reason being, you've just started and need to iterate quickly to get something valuable working. It doesn't matter if it looks good if it's not something people want.

Once you're up and running, and collecting user feedback, you'll have the data a great UX designer needs to work with.

[kls]

Contract the UX design. Have a UX designer provide you with wireframes and functional specs. Have a artist (it may be the UX designer) provide you with a PSD comp. Hire the programmer to implement the UI as designed.

[colinsidoti → kls]

Although I agree with your order, I don't think it really addresses the question. If my budget limitations force me to compromise on either the user experience or the code, which should be compromised?

[kls → colinsidoti]

OK sorry, I was under the assumption that you did not have the revenue to carry both full time. Not that you can only afford one and not have enough left to contract someone on a short term basis. That is a tough one.

Now this is coming from my context and it has a lot to do with how we develop applications, but we do not do server side UI development for the web anymore, we do all of our UI work with JavaScript that communicates to REST services on the back end (we build web apps, not web sites).

Given that disclaimer, I personally would go with the UX designer, so long as s/he is a UX developer that writes the UI. An average back end developer can usually stand up some services that will suffice.

For my group, our reputation is that we can provide web apps that simplify business workflow or increase customer conversion so it is our bread and butter. Please keep that in mind because it naturally creates a bias in my logic.

As well though I think a UX developer (that only does UX) is less utilitarian and therefore if you can afford it, it would be the highest candidate to hire a short term consultant to provide the brain dump for someone else to implement.