6 ms·

I don't get it, design is important but not nearly as important as engineering to any organization. All of these hipsters today in our industry doing design see

• NoCulturalFit 11y ago
  I agree with you. "Photoshop-designers" can only export their PSDs and that's it. I can actually build and design it. If the design isn't satisfactory, I can.... wait for it.. actually iterate on it. In fact, if I had another engineer instead of a photoshop-monkey we could iterate twice as fast on either device or browser.
  • wintom 11y ago
    Absolutely.
  • gjolund 11y ago
    My designers keep asking for "pair design" sessions with me, where I open chrome inspector and "tweak" things for them. So goddamn irritating. Just learn to fucking write some html, js, and css or go back to print design... if it still exists.
    • trisomy21 11y ago
      If they are your designers, it might be time to engineer a better hiring system.
      • gjolund 11y ago
        They are not "my" designers. The design department is managed separately from the Engineering department. I have no control over their tooling, hiring practices, or deliverables.
    • kagamine 11y ago
      UX degee level graduate here, had too many interviews in which an interest and ability to write code was seen as a detriment to the design process because they thought it detracted from the ability to design as a 'dumb user'. And because the people interviewing had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned anything 'engineering'. Some of these people had no idea how the Internet works or how to make a simple web page. And yes, I have do have chip on my shoulder about it, because many UX people are self-taught and have little idea about what UX is either, they just keep churning out "i think" "solutions" that never get tested.
      • NoCulturalFit 11y ago
        I read excuses here.
        • kagamine 11y ago
          Excuses how? Because I didn't get that particular job? I work, I do code and I do UX. There are a great many people in UX who are not trained in UX. Given what the article was about, would you trust an untrained person to make key decisions about your product, or would you rather have someone quallified as in the rest of the IT industry? Not sure what you are replying to, you were too vague.
      • sizzle 11y ago
        Same, did undergrad and masters in HCI at top 30 schools. Love design and love coding. The industry needs more people like us on design teams. Don't be jaded, the graphic designers who claim to be UX designers/researchers that don't understand statistics/how software products are built will not survive for long in the future as tech takes over the world
• TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  Microsoft's lack of interest in UX is well on its way to killing Windows. In fact every previous version of Windows and Office from 3.1 onwards had a lot of UX/usability/design input. Google care so little about design they've just spent the last few years trying to get everyone to use their Material guidelines, and Google's doodles are legendary. Facebook is a lost cause, so I'll give you that. UX isn't just user experience - it's customer experience. And if your customer experience is bad, you don't have customers for long. You can deal with this with hyper-aggressive bully and thug marketing and legal lock-ins. And as a plan, that totally works - until it doesn't any more. Good UX is cheaper and creates less friction for everyone. Ultimately, it's just much easier to deal with customers who don't hate you or your products.'
  • wintom 11y ago
    I couldn't disagree more sir. Microsoft just started giving a shit about design with all the flat stuff and clearly it's failing harder than ever. They should focus on engineering and solving hard engineering problems more than ever if they want to survive, not design. Google does now seem to care about design but its core product still has one input box and button and that's still the main way they make all of their money, and engineers still run that organization. They hired the hipsters when they made their money. In the end design is not indicative of shit in high tech companies, I think my opinion is valid.
    • kagamine 11y ago
      I'd disagree with both you, I use all 3 of the most publicized OSes on a daily basis and I don't see MS as laggig. My experience is this: Linux is improving on a daily basis (but there are too many DEs/WMs which adds to barriers of entry for new users [1]. OS X has dropped the ball, I see too many services being pushed that I do not want and they are getting in the way of me using my Mac. Windows are actually ahead of the times. The every device with one OS was such a good idea on paper, but they jumped the gun. It's the legacy windows support that hold them back. The lack of start menu in Win8 is a priime example, it wouldn't have mattered if everyone had gone over to touchscreens on Jan 1 2014, but they didn't. [1] Recently the good people at Bodhi Linux forked E17 calling the fork Moksha, because they want stability over new features, I would have preferred Jeff and the team to contribute to Enlightenment, but that would mean the Enlightenment team would need ears and continued support of E17. Now I'm not sure I want to swap my DE to Moksha or just keep using E19, forking is the FOSS plague, and its saviour.
• vacri 11y ago
  Proper design is about melding form and function. You're just talking about 'form' designers, who would be better termed as artists. You're also just grabbing Microsoft and Google as being designer-free in their successful years, which is patent nonsense. > In the end engineers build great high tech organizations Again, nonsense. Engineers alone did not make Apple the behemoth it is today. The designers made their unusual products desirable. And the Apple marketing cohort never get their props for the incredible job they did in making a computer company funky. Then there are props to the Apple staff who did magic with their supply chain. You think engineers are the most essential part of a great company? Try to run a company when your business folk can't close a deal to save themselves. History is littered with superior engineering designs that failed in the marketplace. Doesn't matter how good your engineers are if their stuff doesn't sell. Frankly, fuck this "my job is more important than yours" dick-swinging competition. In today's economic-rationalising environment, few jobs aren't essential.
  • wintom 11y ago
    My point is today, more than ever, engineers are essential. Design is not and the article misses that point and is using design as a gauge for a companies health. That's not accurate, anyway that's my opinion. Also it's not just google and Microsoft. It's every other high tech company being Bourne today. Engineering lead organizations are much more likely to succeed.
    • vacri 11y ago
      Part of what you're missing is that designers are closer to the user than engineers usually are, and the article relies on that link. I did support for many years, and I am very aware of the disconnect between what non-customer-contact engineers think users want, and what users actually want. Your customer-contact staff are an excellent barometer to the mood of your users, because they're actually looking at what's going on. And in the case of support and sales staff, they're at the pointy end. And of course engineers are essential to a high-tech company. It's like saying lawyers are essential to a legal firm. But in a lot of tech companies, the engineers are insulated from users, or are even dismissive or abusive of them. Also, the biggest tech company in the world was led from near-bankruptcy to "more cash than the USA" by not an engineer, not a designer, but a business guy. To make a great company - google, microsoft, whatever, you need hardcore business folks that can play the game hard at the highest level. Having a clean engineering setup is nowhere near enough.
• sizzle 11y ago
  What a load of horse shit. No one said design is more important than engineering, rather that software without ux research and design will never be successful in the long run. Look around man, design is the key differentiator. Any engineer can spin up your software in the cloud as a startup and leverage intuitive design to undercut you. You are on hackernews, no one is arguing that engineers are less important than designers. Engineers don't do ethnographic field work to realize how users intuitively prefer to interact with a system in any given industry. Graphic designers mocking up PSDs are useless. A UX team with designers and researchers are worth their weight in gold and bring immense value to the SDLC by helping the dev teams validate their designs against user mental models early on in the product development life cycle. And if you think I'm talking out of my ass, here is a voice of authority: Alan Cooper, “Father of Visual Basic," with his book 'The Inmates Are Running the Asylum' http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672326140 http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672... "The Inmates are Running the Asylum argues that, despite appearances, business executives are simply not the ones in control of the high-tech industry. They have inadvertently put programmers and engineers in charge, leading to products and processes that waste huge amounts of money, squander customer loyalty, and erode competitive advantage. They have let the inmates run the asylum. Alan Cooper offers a provocative, insightful and entertaining explanation of how talented people continuously design bad software-based products. More importantly, he uses his own work with companies big and small to show how to harness those talents to create products that will both thrill their users and grow the bottom line." I highly suggest you step off your pedestal and read this book. If not, enjoy creating your architecturally efficient, crappy software that is a pain for actual humans to use.
  • gjolund 11y ago
    Visual Basic was awful to work with.
    • pavlov 11y ago
      No, it was pretty much unique in 1991. Visual Basic 1.0 was definitely a product that "thrilled users and grew the bottom line", as Alan Cooper puts it.
• TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  > Microsoft never gave a shit about design and did great. How wrong you are! When did Windows make its big leap forward in usability and popularity? Windows 95. Why was it a big leap forward? Because Microsoft poured massive amounts of resources into studying user interaction and rethinking everything to improve the user experience, both for the novice and the pro.
• codingdave 11y ago
  I think you are confusing Graphic Design with UX -- Just using your first example, Google has an awesome UX. One field, one button, and everything is about the results. Its simplicity is its design. UX is not about how pretty a site is... it is about how smooth of an experience the end user receives. UX is required for success. You can have the best engineering in the world, but if your customers don't understand your product, cannot work with it, or get frustrated by it, all that beautiful elegant code means nothing. Products need to solve a problem, not add new pain to existing problems. That does not mean that engineering is less important. Trying to put one above the other is like answering whether the chicken or the egg came first. They are two components that complement each other.
  • wintom 11y ago
    Your first paragraph about Google having great UX, one button one form. That was built by engineers not by designers or by UX guys who do "research". So my argument stands. The best UI/UX is the type that gets out of your way. That is If there was a way to do away with UI and Ux all together and simply control our machines with thoughts or electrical impulses that would be the best UI and UX there is. Engineers know this that all of that stuff just gets in your way, and if they don't know it they quickly learn it through seeing their users interact with their software. We don't need a bunch of people standing around doing "research" telling us that.
    • SapphireSun 11y ago
      I would argue that the UX was designed by engineers with a solid sense of what they wanted and what the customer would want. Whether Larry and Sergey were aware of it or not, they were acting as a designer. I've seen many engineers with exceedingly poor design sense. For instance, a valid choice for Google would have been to clutter the landing page with advanced search options or ancillary material as so many of its contemporaries did. In this case, I would argue that the engineer was skilled at a small set of design tasks. For what it's worth, I'm an engineer, but I'm close friends with designers.
      • 11y ago
• wooky 11y ago
  I started writing this before seeing other comments but I guess I'll finish it - Design is much more of a case-by-case issue than you seem to be making it, and in many cases it's definitely just as important as the engineering. Going with your icing on the cake analogy, design isn't just the icing, but arguably the plate and utensil you're given to eat the cake. You could bake a top-notch cake, but if you're given a piece of paper and a hair curler as utensils, you'll have quite the shitter of a cake-eating experience. What I mean/what I'm sure you've heard before/what design school students pay $160k in tuition to learn is that the purpose of design isn't its artistic aspects of making something pretty, it's meant more to facilitate the process of using a product. And not to be an ass, but I'd say all three of your examples are shit, design was a huge driving factor in each of their success. Google's one bar/one button was a stark contrast to Yahoo trying to corral the entire internet onto their homepage. Facebook's design/UI might look shit in retrospect, but that uniform layout was definitely the primary reason for the mass migration from MySpace's load time hell of profiles littered with clipart and whiny post-punk/emo set to autoplay. Microsoft has made some of the ugliest shit known to mankind, but its core product is literally named after its design, giving users "Windows" so they can spend less time fucking everything up in DOS. In regards to your edit, though, I definitely agree. So much of the design process can end up being determined at the engineer or executive level to the point where evaluating the design team to gauge a company's health is just identifying the turd polishers. And "design team morale" is such a god damn stupid and difficult thing to evaluate since it might be the result of any number of misleading or erroneous factors ranging from the soda machine running out of Pepsi to the team itself being a tight-knit group of lazy incompetents who interview well.
• kriro 11y ago
  Your mental model of designers seems to be "people that make stuff pretty". In the field of software development that's typically not even the most important part of a designer's job. The post specifically mentions HCI. They typically help you A/B test you stuff and are very data oriented and use quantitative methods. The user centered design process (one example being ISO 9241-210) focuses on the user and users' needs. They typically can crank out prototypes (that you can interact with) at a great pace which helps a ton with testing all sorts of hypotheses about your product. That seems really valuable. Especially since they usually can make stuff pretty as well ;)
• annnnd 11y ago
  Author is not talking about "design" - he is talking about "UX design". Totally different beast. Former is, well, design, while the latter is how user experiences your product or service.