[thesash]

Design is not a pretty facade to a product, and designers aren't just responsible for aesthetics. Design is as much about how the product works as how it looks, and a designer worth their stock options understands that they aren't drawing pretty pictures of websites, they're designing with a purpose: to create an enjoyable experience and ultimately a functional, beautiful product that adds value to users lives.

[tptacek]

I think he gets that. I think he sees the real tradeoff, between elegant, usable, pleasurable user experiences that in and of themselves make people want to come back to the product, and raw value creation. And he's saying, for early stage startups, raw value creation is more important no matter how clunky it is.

[ianstormtaylor]

"that solves zero problems but looks like a work of art"

"It is to a massive degree much, much easier to spend a week pushing pixels to create something beautiful"

"Everyone’s a fucking designer now

If there’s one thing you can rely on everyone having an opinion on, it’s how something should look."

"no shimmering design"

"They didn’t solve problems! Who fucking cares how it looks!"

I don't think he gets it at all.

[tptacek]

I understand why you wouldn't like the tone he's writing with, but if you reread those carefully you're going to find that they don't refute my point.

I'm so much less interested in discussing one guy's style than I am in the real point he's making. Nobody's going to remember this blog post in 2 weeks. But startups are going to continue running aground on the mistake he's pointing out.

Note carefully: by "gets it", I'm not saying he gets, like, "the universe", the "ineffable 'it'". I'm saying, the thing you don't think he gets, that there's a real material cost to ignoring design, he probably does get. The fact that bad design has a cost isn't dispositive, because the cost of bad design has to be weighed against the benefit of spending that effort somewhere else.

[momoro]

I don't know why tptacek's comment is downvoted.

My take is that Enrique Allen, the guy behind the D-Fund, is not trying to say "startups should focus more on retention and user experience," he's trying to say "startups should think about users in an effective way."

In a recent talk Allen gave, the designer-founders he mentioned all had significant programming experience.

Almost all of the people he mentions could code their own products. So, he's not saying "get a bunch of photoshop designers to improve your ux," he saying "having people who think from a design perspective can be the difference between a product succeeding and failing."

For him, a design perspective could include something like thinking "how should I construct this API so that people will be able to use this library?"

[ianstormtaylor]

And what I'm saying is that he doesn't see design as "elegant, usable, pleasurable user experiences that in and of themselves make people want to come back to the product".

Because once you do, you see that design and "raw value creation" aren't mutually exclusive. But it's easy to see them as mutually exclusive when you give design a definition of "make things beautiful", exactly as he did.

[rimantas]

The problem is, design is not something you just slap on later. If it is not here from the start it won't be there at the end unless you redo everything from scratch. Design as an afterthought is a lipstick on a pig.

[crowsfan85]

I don't think design should ever be slapped on. But I do think it makes the most sense to test and launch a first version with what amounts to a functional wireframe/prototype, if possible.