[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.