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Definitely programmer. An average designer and a "rockstar" programmer (if he is truly a rockstar programmer) can make a web startup significantly better than w

Definitely programmer. An average designer and a "rockstar" programmer (if he is truly a rockstar programmer) can make a web startup significantly better than what a great UX designer and average programmer can do. UX is important but almost without a doubt your UX will evolve over time and the one used in the beginning will almost never stand the test of time (hopefully the technology behind it will for the most part). Obviously you dont want terrible usability but overall if you have great usability and buggy applications then you will not succeed in the end anyway.

colinsidoti 16y ago
What about Twitter? If this is true, shouldn't the "fail whale" have plagued the company years ago?
- zbruhnke 16y ago
  A valid argument, but one that i would suggest is only because of a lack of competition, similar to the facebook/myspace/friendster battle I think if it were early enough someone could still have come along and ousted twitter with a more reliable site. That said, it certainly never came true. As with any rule I believe this one has exceptions to it, but in the end I think my advice holds true for most startups even if it does not for all.
  - colinsidoti 16y ago
    Interesting, I would actually take the opposite approach. When it comes to startups, I don't think rockstar programming is really enough to set a company apart. While the company is small some bad code shouldn't send it to the grave. Code is invisible; the users will never see it and as long as it works it shouldn't matter if it's elegant object-oriented programming or unorganized "spaghetti" code. If a programmer is truly committed to the project, they will make it work and that should be all that matters. The user experience however, needs to be excellent from the start. A startup may pick up some early, tech-savvy adopters if there is a very cool technology, but with a poor user experience the general population will never adopt the new technology. That said, your point about the UX needing to evolve is well-taken. Do you think users preferred Facebook over MySpace because of its programming or because of its user experience?
    - zbruhnke 16y ago
      "Do you think users preferred Facebook over MySpace because of its programming or because of its user experience?" I think it was a combination of the two, but that is my whole point to start with. As someone who was a member of facebook when it was still "thefacebook" if you remember in the beginning the UX was very basic, people flocked to it because of its exclusivity to an extent and they stayed (at least in my opinion) because they weren't having the constant downtime they were used to experiencing with a site like "friendster". Facebook was the site that people stayed on because it was fun "facebook stalking" became a hobby for many, that had much less to do with the UX then most people would lead you to believe. My basic point is that while a good UX is a necessity in the beginning a great one is not, because your users will demand what they want in usability. But with a faulty system or code that is constantly being chopped and hacked the growth of your system and frequent downtime for fixes could very well be your downfall. EDIT: I would also like to say that I do NOT think your "code is invisible" statement really holds true. Good code is elegant in itself, it allows for subtle flaws to be hidden, and neat little tricks that a good hacker can make happen is what excites users and makes them come back for more, even if they don't know it is code doing it, they can see it and it does make a diffrence. (at least in my opinion)
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]

colinsidoti 16y ago

What about Twitter? If this is true, shouldn't the "fail whale" have plagued the company years ago?

zbruhnke 16y ago
A valid argument, but one that i would suggest is only because of a lack of competition, similar to the facebook/myspace/friendster battle I think if it were early enough someone could still have come along and ousted twitter with a more reliable site. That said, it certainly never came true. As with any rule I believe this one has exceptions to it, but in the end I think my advice holds true for most startups even if it does not for all.
- colinsidoti 16y ago
  Interesting, I would actually take the opposite approach. When it comes to startups, I don't think rockstar programming is really enough to set a company apart. While the company is small some bad code shouldn't send it to the grave. Code is invisible; the users will never see it and as long as it works it shouldn't matter if it's elegant object-oriented programming or unorganized "spaghetti" code. If a programmer is truly committed to the project, they will make it work and that should be all that matters. The user experience however, needs to be excellent from the start. A startup may pick up some early, tech-savvy adopters if there is a very cool technology, but with a poor user experience the general population will never adopt the new technology. That said, your point about the UX needing to evolve is well-taken. Do you think users preferred Facebook over MySpace because of its programming or because of its user experience?
  - zbruhnke 16y ago
    "Do you think users preferred Facebook over MySpace because of its programming or because of its user experience?" I think it was a combination of the two, but that is my whole point to start with. As someone who was a member of facebook when it was still "thefacebook" if you remember in the beginning the UX was very basic, people flocked to it because of its exclusivity to an extent and they stayed (at least in my opinion) because they weren't having the constant downtime they were used to experiencing with a site like "friendster". Facebook was the site that people stayed on because it was fun "facebook stalking" became a hobby for many, that had much less to do with the UX then most people would lead you to believe. My basic point is that while a good UX is a necessity in the beginning a great one is not, because your users will demand what they want in usability. But with a faulty system or code that is constantly being chopped and hacked the growth of your system and frequent downtime for fixes could very well be your downfall. EDIT: I would also like to say that I do NOT think your "code is invisible" statement really holds true. Good code is elegant in itself, it allows for subtle flaws to be hidden, and neat little tricks that a good hacker can make happen is what excites users and makes them come back for more, even if they don't know it is code doing it, they can see it and it does make a diffrence. (at least in my opinion)
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]