Also, this is not really a yes/no question; it's a discussion prompt. :)
In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.
So if your goal is to make something consumer facing or where the user is key in your thinking don't use a professional designer, make one a co-founder.
I think design is wildly underutilized and 1 good design hire can be worth 5-10 engineers at the early stage. This may sound heretical, but a good designer can make UX decisions that have massive impact across a site, but piggy back on pre-existing engineering tasks. This doesn't scale though. 10 designers aren't equal to 10 engineers.
That said, if you are creating some B2B product that doesn't have a lot of meaningful user interaction, the value exchange is simple, or there aren't a lot of competitive solutions (web or otherwise) then piece something together via woothemes and 99 designs, or make friends with a good designer.
I'm a programmer by night / business type by day. I have a website soon to be released in beta and I hired a designer I trusted (and could afford) from a previous job. She worked wonders for the project -- seeing the new design also reinvigorated me.
A few tips: Hire a friend if possible (you'll probably get a friend-rate), if not work by referral. You want someone you can sit with face to face. Avoid 99Designs and the like if you can. Pay your invoices immediately and you'll find the designer will likely continue to be super helpful. Also, get an hourly rate up front since you'll probably find things that need to be adjusted. Lastly, I wouldn't use the designer for HTML, just have them hand off PSDs, the markup tends to be not so good. Insist on PSDs, not flattened images.
By the way, I'm happy to give a refferal for a trusted friend. Just email me at juliuss at gmail.
It ends up costing a little more in the long run, but you also get a better quality product.
Working with a good ux designer will completely change your understanding of the role of design in product development. They can play a pivotal role in defining and shaping your product. And yes, a person with these qualities almost invariably can also code. Understanding the underpinning technologies of the web remains nearly inextricably entwined with understanding the design potential of the web.
As an aside, I think a platonic ideal founding team would have 2-3 people who share varying degrees of business, design and technical acumen. Each person has a defined role, but they also relate to their co-founders' roles in a meaningful way. Really understanding what it means to be GREAT at something often requires educating yourself enough to become mediocre at it. Completely partitioned specialization is for companies big enough to need HR departments.
Umm...why not? You just said you'd never hand your stuff over to them, so what basis do you have for not trusting them?
I've personally had great results with several of them, much better than I've had with many designers.
Web designers that can't code are just designers. So make sure you hire a web designer for your website and you will get a better result.
Also, the majority of professional webdesigner out there are starting prototype with CSS.
v1? Just get the damn thing out. Don't worry about whether it has the perfect design or interactions at this point since the hardest part is simply launching (and you're going to change your idea/design once you get feedback anyways). After that, I believe a designer is invaluable, for taking user feedback and results and crafting the product into something that promotes more sales/views.
Suck it up, find a good designer and pay them well. I'm glad I did.
Firstly, what stage of a startup are we talking about? Are we talking a guy building just a landing page? Are we talking a 20-person team with VC? The answer is different for each case, both because of the money available, but also because of how much that design will end up being used. A landing page that might never lead to a product shouldn't cost you $1,000.
I haven't had much experience on the later stages of a startup, but I have built a few products to the beginning stages. Early on, I made the mistake of building the product without a design first thing. I figured, if it gets good feedback, I can alway redesign it. Instead, what I would do today if I were building any product is go buy a template for $50, and work off that. Saves a lot of redesign time (which is harder to do, since you've already got legacy code). Also, gets you the "good design first impression" right off the bat, which will lead to more accurate results when you need them the most (since you really don't know if the product will be a success or not).
For a landing page, which you should do before building a product (unless the product is really simple), I've recently learned the best way. Go to WooThemes.com or ThemeForest.com, buy a WordPress template for $70, and it will make setting up your landing page a Wysiwyg experience, which is much better. Even if you're a programmer like me, trust me on this, using WordPress will make things smoother, and the design will be better for it.
As for an actual startup with an actual product (and money in the bank), I wouldn't even think twice: hire a designer.
...assuming the startup is bootstrapping. Why?
1) Ugly designs are often very effective. 2) You can polish it later when you're making money.
Your site might look amazing. Your site might look crappy. If no one knows about your site or no one cares, then it doesn't matter either way.
Focus on traction for the product or service you're providing, then worry about the design of your letterhead, business cards, shiny web 2.0 logo, etc.
An ugly design that works is actually a good design.
Several people in this thread make the point that design isn't just the veneer, but definitely the whole user experience. But sometimes people confuse "looking pretty" with "well designed". Those often go hand-in-hand, but not always, which is very important to keep in mind.
It's easy for folks who are used to conflating the two to accept a good looking design because it looks good, rather than it working well for the user.
I'm hoping it's true because I'm bootstrapping an app that's on the ugly side. I've been told the product and workflow are solid but that the amateur design will hurt conversions. It's a B2B product. Personally I think the ugly design will filter out some tire-kickers (which is good because the product is somewhat compute-intensive) but anyone who knows they need the product will not be deterred. Of course I could be biased.
I'd like to add that I don't intend to keep it ugly, but I'm hoping to see some revenue first.
That said, for a consumer facing product, user experience and design does become important after a point - but it need not be your priority at the very early stage.
My product is http://smallpayroll.ca, it's a do it yourself payroll site made for people who don't know anything about payroll. I freely admit it looks like crap. But of the handful of people that have tried it out and paid for it, I haven't heard "this looks like crap". What I hear is "this product makes my life so much easier"
Could I get more conversions with a better design? Maybe... But I know for my product it's not preventing me from getting paying customers.
(As an aside, I've often thought there should be a place for people like us to find designers that know how to work with applications instead of just designing web pages.)
http://www.mylanguageexchange.com/
Your site strikes me as in the "good enough" category. The design isn't anything special, either good or bad. This means that there is nothing bad about the design to bring your product down and I think it also means that the law of diminishing returns may apply to putting resources into making the design better.
And it's rare for a strong systems or web back-end programmer to also have a good design sense and to be versed in the various rendering quirks and workarounds for the common browsers.
Note that it doesn't mean you have to hire a full-time designer. A lot of designers are freelancers, and like it that way.
37signals' Sortfolio (http://www.sortfolio.com/) lists a lot of independent designers for a range of budgets.
But, you'll be even better off if you have someone with good design skills working for you if you plan to be able to do revisions, ongoing changes.
I worked for a small company that outsourced some design for logo, but ended up hiring someone full-time to do photography and design. It was a bold step since they were a telecom company, but the polish and sheer amount of the work by having someone in-house differentiate them from their competitor.
At first I thought they were foolish (for years actually), but now that he is still working there, and seeing where they are, it was sheer genius to have hired him.
Focusing on what you do best (programming) and subcontracting what you do worst (design) leads to a great product imho. If you end up doing both, you'll eventually lose motivation because you'll never get satisfied with your own designs (you are not a designer after all). Not to mention that you'll be shifting focus back and forth between design/programming, and each one requires a different kind of focus and way of thinking. The end product if it sees the light? Mediocre at best.
but you don't need a designer for that.
1. istockphoto gets you a ton of illustrations that you can use to spice up your pages.
2. 99designs gets you a good logo or any other custom work you need. Some people will knock 99designs...and yes the quality may be worse than one you'd get from a top of the line designer. But it'll be miles ahead of what you can achieve on your own, and you'll get to avoid paying thousands for a logo.
from my experience, a single illustration can turn a boring and bland page into something that's decent.
Seriously, skip the kids at 99designs and hire a local freelance designer. Maybe you can get lucky and guarantee them [X] number of hours a month in exchange for a lower rate.
And who cares about consistency..it's just something to use for a few months until the site gets profitable to get someone good. You just don't want something that looks like crap. And you can always just use the one person whose design you picked for more work.
And it's not like you are guaranteed good stuff from a local designer...plenty of them are worse than the "kids" at 99 designs.
If you're building a photo sharing site, better get a UX guy.
If you're building a social app, then hell yes, get a UX guy AND a designer.
A UX designer is largely focused on how things work. If I press "X" button what happens? Should the input method for this app be a number pad or a scroll wheel? etc.
A graphic/visual designer is focused on how the app looks. What are the feelings this app is trying to evoke? Does it have a rough "hacker" look or is this something Martha Stewart devotees would like?
These are rough generalizations along a spectrum. Some UX designers are more product manager types, interested in specifying features and high level behaviors leaving implementation level wireframes to a designer or engineer. Some graphic designers also like to get involved in the feature selection/design. It really varies by person, but its important to understand what you need before you hire. Nothing worse than trying to get slick graphics from someone whose passion is task analysis or strategic input from someone who loves polishing pixels.
A designer can be many things. You can hire an interaction designer. You can hire an interface designer. You can hire a website designer.
I am going to assume you are speaking about an interface/web designer. Yes is the answer. When it comes down to it, your end users are probably going to avoid your service if they don't think it looks good. The amount of traffic you'd gain with a good design easily justifies the price of hiring a good designer.
Now, the other thing is the word 'professional'. Professionals are very expensive. You're talking at least 10 thousand dollars for a decent project. If you go with someone who's a student or the like (cough), you'll get a better rate, but you won't get the timeline that a startup might need. There's the other issue. If it's not going to repay itself in traffic easily, then it's not worth it. In most cases, will it? Of course.
The other option is DIY. If you take some time and learn your shit, you can usually do something that doesn't look half-assed.
Now, moving on to the HTML bit. I do both. Many designers do both. Plain and simple: if you don't know markup, you shouldn't make mockups.
YES. The value that a design has in a first impression helps with that first bit of traction so so much. I've had projects fail because of crappy designs, and crappy projects succeed because of - subjectively - great ones.
Invest, it's not even that much compared to some of your other costs. Look into students (like me!) who may need the money and the recognition, though don't abuse them.
try to stick to something simple and clear that lets users know what they're doing next.
The trouble with using free time from a friend is 1. by being free, it is harder to give blunt feedback; 2. by being a favor, you are beholden to their schedule, and can they really keep up with your pace of iteration and learning based on customer development? It can put strain on friendships.
So in the earliest days I say try to DIY unless you really don't have a design bone in your body. Use paper and Balsamiq to sketch, and examine what you like and dislike of comparable products.
You can always hire a professional designer later to come in and help once you feel confident that you are close to the right product for the right customer.
A designer does more than just make pretty pictures.
Ugly or not (the art, not the designer), a designer actually will help design the usability of the site at the same time so that you can grow.
A good designer knows where to put the little calls-to-action and the email signup forms and all that so that you can meet your business goals.
It's definitely worthwhile to get a professional designer.
I have been turned off on a number of occasions by the lack of a professional design.
You could probably scrape by, by getting a free theme from the intertubes, but what about your logo/branding.
Go to your local college and post something for a design job. You will get a ton of replies and it probably won't cost you that much.
One thing to keep in mind: No matter how good your design is, it is no match for an ugly site with a really useful feature..
Maybe this will help - Has anybody dared to do any A/B testing on professional vs "unprofessional" design?
If the idea holds enough water, it doesn't NEED a good design (re: Craigslist, tarsnap, the original Digg, etc.) -- it just needs to work. If it works, and you can prove there's a business there, then by all means, spend the money to make it perform as well as you possibly can. Design in this sense is an 'optimization' technique, not part of the core product.
The flip side, is if you have a horrible idea, and you spend $10k on design, you've effectively thrown that money away.
The exceptions to this, of course, are in the demographic. If your target market is web designers, they're going to be hypercritical of any design, so it needs to excel from day 1. If your startup is an iPhone app, same thing. Otherwise, most people will be forgiving of a spartan design, so long as the damn thing works, and that'll give you leverage to design against.
Also, another big point in this is that as you build the product, you'll change how things work, a lot. In the application I'm building now, I had Photoshop mockups for every page, and how I thought they would look, but in the initial testing, I've changed almost every page somewhat dramatically. It costs me time, which I hate, but it's better than costing me time AND dollars I'd have to pay a professional designer to re-design because I changed the position of button x. And, while I hate having to re-implement, I'd much rather not move into production with button x in the wrong place because I couldn't afford to pay a designer to move it.
I know of a direct-response guy who had horribly ugly sales pages that literally included misspellings. He tells this story about how all kinds of marketing consultants and designers would come in and say, "Your sales page is so ugly! You need a redesign." He would laugh and say, "Everyone says that. But I have data from the last 5 years, and this is the single best-performing page of all." He made $25m last year.
Sophisticated direct marketers are not to be trifled with.
However, if you're building a company that depends on other non-direct factors like brand, you can't really A/B test that. You just have to make a decision.
A few years back, I met a guy whose girlfriend worked on the optimization team at Amazon. Now THEY are sophisticated. They knew how A/B tweaks would affect users several months later. But even still, Amazon often makes strategic decisions that can't always be justified with data.
Bottom line: It's important to know the advantages and disadvantages of various types of marketing, including direct/brand/etc. But you will have to make some tough choices.
Personally, on my sites, I've seen lots of interesting results with testing designs...but I finally told my staff to stop micro-testing since we'd optimized the hell out of some of our stuff and were only getting incremental gains (e.g., going from 35% opt-in rate to 39% is prohibitively difficult). The biggest results I've gotten have been from strategic changes like changing the offer, adding a new product, pricing changes, back-end offers, deeper customer research, etc.
In this age of analytics, I think a lot of small startups are overlooking the gut decisions they need to make and focusing too much on optimization (e.g. this HN question).
"Portfolio: Are you always extremely methodical about major decisions?
Bezos: With business decisions, yes. With personal decisions, I find that my methodical nature can confuse me, and so I think more about personal decisions, like what job you really want to take or whom you want to marry. Although I did have criteria for that...
Portfolio: What's a gut call you made?
Bezos: Amazon Prime. It's an all-you-can-eat buffet, $79, that gives you free two-day shipping on everything you buy for a year. When you do the math on that, it always tells you not to do it.
Portfolio: One of your big initiatives, a search engine called A9, fell flat. What happened?
Bezos: If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you're going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table. Companies are rarely criticized for the things that they failed to try. But they are, many times, criticized for things they tried and failed at."
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2008/05/portfolio_0...
This post talks a lot about this type of usability and speaks to this point (and even mentions A/B testing with usability): http://sixrevisions.com/usabilityaccessibility/10-usability-...
Visual design as decoration is probably less effective, and I think you'll get a lot of that with "Unprofessional" designers. Visual design as a way to amplify/enhance existing well-designed interactions is definitely effective (i.e. strong button affordance, good use of color to convey meaning, etc). This is the type of output you'll get with a "Professional" designer.
Philosophy aside, I think you'd probably do better with qualitative testing. Do people tend to complete tasks easier if the action being tested "looks" easier? Does the brand identity match the audience you're targeting? Are your design patterns consistent across the site? Etc, etc. It's certainly a bit more nebulous but I think with the right questions you could certainly use A/B testing to answer some of these things.
For web sites for a startup, Themeforest is the way to go. A small amount of cash gets you a theme that you can use for your MVP, redesign once you're profitable and know how much you can spend.
So, yes, design matters :)