So I was thinking today, why does it seem that the equation is always technical > business/marketing. Why is designer never a part of this equation for a startup founding team.
Especially looking at Apple, designers are the core of their business.
Interested in the discussion...
EDIT: To clarify, design means product and user interface design.
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.
Also, I'm glad you qualified your last statement with this: "unless the key element to what they were doing was uniquely technical." I once had a graphic designer tell me his role was more important than the programming side to web sites, which I totally disagree with. I have a one word retort to that: craigslist. It's true that oftentimes great graphic design is a necessary ingredient to the success of a site, but that's not always the case.
Let me explain it better this way. I am fantastic at putting together wireframes for sites. A wireframe requires no programming or artistic ability, because it uses simply black and white lines, yet still effectively communicates the placement of elements, site flow, and overall intended functional user experience. I believe this is the type of design you're referring to. Again, this is something I feel I'm quite good at. Now, while I'm fully capable of cutting up and building out any wireframes I (or anyone else) come up with, and putting them online, it's probably not a good idea, because black and white lines would lack visual appeal. That's where graphic artists (what I usually call graphic designers) come in -- but in that instance they're mostly just adding in shapes, colors, and gradients etc. (and figuring out border width ;)
To me, building great wireframes and flow charts generally fits better with the thinking of programmers -- people most in tuned with thinking logically -- than creative artsy types, but that's just my thinking.
I've certainly seen it performed like this. In fact, I believe it's the norm. But I also think it's the cause of many bad experiences.
The perfect flow, in my opinion, is to have the same person responsible for how it works and how it looks because the best interfaces and applications merges those two together.
Also, I largely consider wireframes and flow charts to be poor substitutions for designers capable of jumping straight from ultra-rough paper sketch to HTML. The more layers of indirection, the worse.
Yes, I agree craigslist has a design. It's a functional design, the kind I'm great at. What I'm not so good at is art/graphic design. I could have built craigslist from scratch completely by myself in a few weeks, if that long, but that's because I can lay things out and use shades of gray quite well.
I don't want to have an argument. I'm just sharing my view on what I think good design actually is.
I'm not trying to argue, either. This is an interesting topic for me. Where the purely technical/engineering world merges with the artistic world there is often interesting overlap. Is it better to have form over function, or function over form? I think the answer is that it depends case by case on the desired result, and both areas often compromise to accommodate the other. So, for example, "concept cars" usually have exotic form, and look great, but they are usually hypothetical only because in reality they wouldn't be that great functionally -- they're usually purely artistic.
The value of really good designer is in the ability to understand what kind of design and how much of it is needed in order to make something _work_ well/better as opposed to just look nice (what can be simply harmful in some cases, I call it monkey with grenade...).
So I think if when you say designer you mean someone who has ability to understand bigger picture and uses his skills as a tool to achieve something, you definitely need one (and you'll have a hard time finding him). But if it's just about looks then I'm not sure.
btw, design is not art, design is an industrial term believe it or not. Child of mass production in 19th century:)
Design is not art? Hmm... I think Leonardo da Vinci would possibly disagree with that. But maybe you're saying "design" is more mathematical in nature -- something either fits and works, or it doesn't. I could see that. Are graphic designers not usually artists? Or maybe you're saying the term should be "graphic artists" and not "graphic designers"?
btw, I lol'ed at monkey with grenade :)
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.
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).
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...
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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?
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).
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