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Comment by qq66 | Hacker News Reader

Zuckberg IS a designer. Facebook gained massive initial traction not because it was technologically superior to other options (although it eventually ended up being so), but because it was very well thought out from a product perspective.

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The UX of Facebook beats the pants off Myspace, but still... doesn't strike me as a triumph of design. Though to be fair this may just be because things break more readily at a half billion users.

remember, it's not the most competent that wins, but rather the least incompetent.

By design I don't mean rounded corners and typography -- I mean things like limiting the networks to universities to begin with, having the Facebook graph mirror real-life social networks, the timing and characteristics of News Feed, Platform, Connect, etc.

Oh, ok. The article seems to be talking about designers as the user-centric UX guys, or at least that's how I took it. I believe that this is critical to mainstream adoption, but agree that your point is excellent as well.

That's not typically referred to as a designer. Those types of things typically fall into the realm of a "program manager".

IMHO, the early Facebook was much better designed for one purpose (flirting and hooking up with members of the opposite sex), the current version is decently designed for multiple purposes (online identity, social games, etc...)

MySpace failed by assuming that legions of random users would make intelligent design decisions, and giving them control over major style elements. The result being that users would receive a visual kick in the teeth every time they followed a link to a different user's page.

So, while FB certainly profited from that failure, but I wouldn't say that FB actively competed with a consciously superior design.

That's why I switched (and why I coaxed my friends over from MySpace).

Did you mean "product designer" not "UX kind of designer"?

I guess I have a different view of UX designers than some... I think of UX designer as basically the "designer of the experience that users will have..." effectively the entire product manager minus any monetization efforts. I use "UI designer" to mean graphics etc.

He is also a hacker. A designer lacks the skills that hackers and only hackers possess. so fuck no.

Are you saying that the two are mutually exclusive? "I suck at design" is an excuse, and the technological equivalent to "I'm just bad at math."

By that logic, doesn't a hacker lack the skills that designers and only designers possess?

The whole dichotomy is silly. A tech business needs to figure out what to build, to build it, and to sell it. (Not strictly in that order.) Every one of those steps requires cross-functional thinking.

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