| I'd like to give an alternate perspective to the Business Guy vs. Technical Guy dichotomy. What about your UX Guy? (apologies for the gender-specific wording; both women and men are "Guys" in my post, here) The UX Guy the one that takes Business Guy's wacky ideas and hones them down to a limited feature set that people can actually understand. He helps the Technical Guy map out the user flows, often deals with the tedious writing of use cases, business rules, and content matrices. A good UX Guy even gets involved with the data modeling. Your UX Guy brings the insight about how people will use a product, and knows how to create scenarios that anticipate that use. Those scenarios focus the work, and usually shrink the feature set. The UX Guy is the one with the interaction design skills, the usability skills, and the one who makes sure the brilliant idea from Business Guy and the brilliant execution from Technical Guy actually result in something people will want to use, and most importantly, can understand how to use. Sometimes your Technical Guy is also your UX Guy. Sometimes Business Guy is (not that often, sadly). No matter what, though, I'd argue that having a UX co-founder is one of the most valuable things you can do. |