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Comment by jessep | Hacker News Reader

This rings true for me. I studied product design in school, in a program run by IDEO. David Kelley was my advisor. Yet, working in the web world, I don't call myself a "designer". Why? Because I'm not focused on the visual.

The training we received is still the core of how I think about everything. It was all about needfinding, methods for exploring the problem and solution space, iterating with low cost mediums and moving to higher cost only as needed for more information or production, things like that. Things that relate to human needs, understanding them, and seeing how the things you make relate to them.

Visual design was a minor part of the curriculum, we had a few art requirements. But it wasn't the core.

It is sad that design means visual perfection and smooth animations. Design is really about uncovering novel ways to improve people's lives, and doing so in the simplest way possible. It doesn't necessarily even relate to interfaces.

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Precisely this. The examples in this article are all examples of innovation UI design, which is just a small, albeit highly visible edge of design.

That being said, startups like Uber, Waze, AirBnB, and Nest have all reached staggering levels of success by re-designing the entire stack of user experience in their respective markets. While the interfaces of these products are generally clean, they're not really the crux of the design innovation. Instead, the critical design innovation is elsewhere, in design of the systems, processes, technologies, and even business models that enable a magical end user experience.

Yeah, I think this gets to the heart of it.

To be fair, AirBNB's site ain't all that great, and they only had to improve upon the mid-90s vintage VRBO, which is about the lowest bar for design imaginable.

You miss the point. AirBnB redesigned how one acquires temporary housing when visiting another city (staying at an individual's house, arranged via an online marketplace). Their site's visual design is really ancillary to that.

I don't think AirBnB has really added that much to the VRBO experience or business model.

They did something that caused them to stand out and become wildly successful. If that something is caused by the site being more usable or somehow easier, then they have added something to the business model.

All the training in needfinding, and exploring the problem and solution sound very similar to how business school classes work to me.

And I would guess that those skills are all very valuable, but aren't enough on their own. Lots of the hardest and most important problems and needs to solve in our world are in fields that require deep domain knowledge.

It feels like because so many startup founders don't have the patience to go into a field and acquire that domain knowledge everyone is focused on problems that yuppies have that can be solved by looking at a screen.

Business schools have some of this, for sure. But they also have a lot of high level technical analysis (market size, cost structure) and a ton of things unrelated (finance, management, etc.)

What I was taught as the "design process" is actually much closer to what people study in anthropology and ethnography than business school.

Some of the core requirements involved going to unfamiliar places and just observing, asking questions, embedding yourself in an effort to understand domains and cultures that you aren't familiar with. That was a big part of the point, forcing people into doing that kind of stuff.

Another issue that leads to all this is that "design" is an overloaded word, with many valid uses that are only tangentially related. Product design, interaction design, graphic design, etc., some of these put form over function, by definition, others put function over form, as is their purpose.

I'd say that the main point of the article is that function/purpose/problem/need first design is the revolutionary thing, and there was an opening for the word "design" to resources behind it. Into that opening poured a stream of by great designers from form focused design domain, and the result was disappointing.

Sort of off topic: What program was that? And what were some of the most influential/important/essential textbooks/resources/projects available to you? I'd like to piece together a similar curriculum for myself.

I'd imagine it is the Product Design program at Stanford.

Yeah.

If design is about "uncovering novel ways to improve people's lives", then the biggest leaps tend to come from technology/software-driven solutions (vs aesthetics)?

> then the biggest leaps tend to come from technology/software-driven solutions

s/come from/utilize/

Generally, the tech side is one-level-removed. A lot of tech-work involves providing for people... who interact with other people who are experiencing the "real" problems.

Don't get me wrong, it's valuable work (and boundaries can blur) but it's like the difference between... a lawyer and a social worker. Or a bridge-builder versus a traffic planner.

That is if your tech is commoditized. For instance, you could argue surgeon just needs to execute a series of well understood steps and be prepared for various situations along with having the right technique. But there are also surgeons who pioneer new breakthroughs and research new procedures. It seems like a lot of apps aren't really breakthroughs technologically, so your point is valid there, but that's not true for all apps or programmers... off the top of my head... Shazam is an app that I think is tech-driven. One click to recognize a song is a great design, but it didn't take a great designer to make it (just great programmers).

> But there are also surgeons who pioneer new breakthroughs and research new procedures.

I agree, but the key point in there is that applying new tech often requires significant domain-knowledge in whatever that other industry is.

Generally, this means chains of people, rather than just one person who happens to be both a professional programmer and professional <other thing>.

+1 your point, but I'm not clear what you're implying about the relationship between lawyers & social workers. (said as someone who works every day with lawyers and has very close relationships with LCSW+ social workers)

Sorry, maybe that metaphor doesn't quite work, I think I had some idea about lawyers who aren't directly contacted by the client but who are being pulled in after some procedural ball has already been put in motion. Maybe I should've said paralegal.

At any rate, less "You came to me for help in achieving legal goals X, Y, Z" and more "the civil-rights organization has hired me on your behalf".

Perhaps the best innovators can bridge that gap in their head?

There is also interaction design* to consider, which is completely orthogonal to visual design. In organizations that are not very design focused, interaction design is typically performed by PMs who are untrained in the practice.

* In the American sense. In the European sense, this term is often used to denote the design of interactive experiences, which is quite different.

There's a middle ground of having leaps come from applying technology that already exists, but in novel ways (see: touch screens for the iPhone). So neither purely engineering driven nor purely aesthetically driven.

Apple's innovation was multi-touch, which is a combination of software/hardware (or technology)?

Multi-touch was demoed in the early 90's at PARC. Apple's innovation was probably the marketing that convinced people to pay for it.

Do you know of similar programs in San Francisco or that are online? I've been looking at product design courses for months.

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