Ask HN: Should we hire a design intern?

* Is this even a good idea? We're an all-developer team and don't have much experience in the space of working directly with designers. - An intern is inherently someone who is learning, who needs coaching. If you have no experienced designer for them to work under, they're likely going to have a hard time and you're going to have a hard time working with them. If the intern doesn't have experience working with developers, and you don't have experience working with designers, it could be a recipe for disaster. If, on the other hand, you hired someone who has experience working with developers, they may be able to walk you through it.

* Is it reasonable to expect him/her to be able to provide much help with our overall application look-and-feel, or does that tend to require a more highly specialized designer? - You definitely want someone with UI design experience... a "designer" who's just made a couple of logos and a flyer for their university club isn't going to cut it.

If this is an afterthought, hire an intern and see if it works out. Look at their work samples and ask - if I got this same quality of work from them, would I be happy with it (aka don't expect anything better than what's in their portfolio).

If this is essential to your application and delivering value (I feel UI/UX often is) then you should find the resources for an experienced professional instead, even part time, instead of a full-time intern.

If you don't have a designer working for you now, don't hire an intern to do your design for you. Internships should be like apprenticeships; what you get out of it is some cheap labor and a likely hire trained in your methods, and what they get out of it is skill and a portfolio.

If you don't add to their skill it's a bad deal for them and even if they take the job you're taking advantage of them. You'd give them a starting portfolio, but a good internship should be both.

You don't mention if it's just a facelift you want or if the UX/flow needs help too.

Speaking from experience, it is often painful for everyone to have these roles come in after-the-fact unless the design is really barebones or built with something like Foundation or Bootstrap. Are you willing to completely scrap what you have now from a design perspective if they feel strongly that it needs it? Do you have engineers available to help fill in the programmatic gaps the designer can't code out themselves?

I'd also echo others here and say this is not the job of an intern. The icons, maybe, but if you're looking for someone to really help you out with web app design, you would be better served by someone with actual experience working on other products lest you want to end up with something you'll just need to pay someone more to fix later. As I insinuated in the last paragraph, try to find a designer that can code so you can bypass any potential problems with Photoshop comps not being built out correctly, especially if your engineers are not design-savvy, aren't comfortable with CSS or have a tendency to use mockups more as suggestive guides than an official proof.