12 ms·

I am happy that we have a discussion on the subject. Its rare nowadays. We all share bits of personal and professional true, which is what makes HN a priceless

by nbzso 6y ago

I am happy that we have a discussion on the subject. Its rare nowadays. We all share bits of personal and professional true, which is what makes HN a priceless place. "Another possibility is that most founders have so little knowledge of good design and what it can do that most of them don't even consider whether it can be used to their advantage. I suspect there is some truth in both of these theories." Commoditisation of design elements is a chance for startups to hire qualified designer from the start. In hands of a good designer, commoditisation is a prototype tool, not final point of implementation. The problem is that they are not willing to pay for "design", because they undervalue the work of designers and don't understand how critical is for their products in competitive market in which everyone uses the same UI libraries, the same "best practices", the same PM mantras.

Silhouette 6y ago
I think perhaps the question we are avoiding here is exactly when it makes sense for a tech firm to bring in specialist design skills. It's easy to say "from the start", but in reality, if you've got maybe 1-3 founders starting a new tech business from scratch, it would be unusual for any of them to be a specialist designer. Maybe one of them has some decent design skills in addition to whatever their main role is, but that's probably the best you're going to get. The first hires will almost certainly need to be developers or salespeople. If you're looking for early funding, you need something to show potential investors and you need to know if you've found product-market fit. If it's a bootstrapped firm that isn't looking for outside investment, you need to bring money into the bank and establish a sustainable cash flow, and no amount of design will do that if you don't have something you can sell and someone to sell it. So realistically, you're probably looking at bringing in specialist designers no earlier than the "second wave" of employees. At that point, you probably already have some sort of MVP and maybe a few further iterations. If a designer can't come in at that stage and effectively guide the existing product towards better usability and aesthetics, I think they're going to find opportunities for work are very sparse. Then the question becomes, do all the commoditised toolkits and marketplace themes and colour scheme generators and icon packs do enough to make an early product useful before a "real" designer is involved? And I think obviously the answer is yes, because a lot of businesses have been doing that in recent years and it's worked for them. They're not ideal, but at that stage, they're good enough. And so finally, I think the fundamental issue is about how a team building a new product without a dedicated designer can use those off-the-shelf tools and make something with good enough usability to be useful and attract business, while recognising that this is ideally a temporary situation and keeping everything as flexible as possible for the next stage of design when it starts to become more important and maybe they're starting to have team members with those specialist skills coming in to take responsibility for that aspect of the product. This is a subject that I see very little discussion about, compared to all the talk about one ready-made tool or another, or how an established design team might respond to different requirements later on.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

by nbzso 6y ago

Silhouette 6y ago

I think perhaps the question we are avoiding here is exactly when it makes sense for a tech firm to bring in specialist design skills. It's easy to say "from the start", but in reality, if you've got maybe 1-3 founders starting a new tech business from scratch, it would be unusual for any of them to be a specialist designer. Maybe one of them has some decent design skills in addition to whatever their main role is, but that's probably the best you're going to get. The first hires will almost certainly need to be developers or salespeople. If you're looking for early funding, you need something to show potential investors and you need to know if you've found product-market fit. If it's a bootstrapped firm that isn't looking for outside investment, you need to bring money into the bank and establish a sustainable cash flow, and no amount of design will do that if you don't have something you can sell and someone to sell it. So realistically, you're probably looking at bringing in specialist designers no earlier than the "second wave" of employees. At that point, you probably already have some sort of MVP and maybe a few further iterations. If a designer can't come in at that stage and effectively guide the existing product towards better usability and aesthetics, I think they're going to find opportunities for work are very sparse. Then the question becomes, do all the commoditised toolkits and marketplace themes and colour scheme generators and icon packs do enough to make an early product useful before a "real" designer is involved? And I think obviously the answer is yes, because a lot of businesses have been doing that in recent years and it's worked for them. They're not ideal, but at that stage, they're good enough. And so finally, I think the fundamental issue is about how a team building a new product without a dedicated designer can use those off-the-shelf tools and make something with good enough usability to be useful and attract business, while recognising that this is ideally a temporary situation and keeping everything as flexible as possible for the next stage of design when it starts to become more important and maybe they're starting to have team members with those specialist skills coming in to take responsibility for that aspect of the product. This is a subject that I see very little discussion about, compared to all the talk about one ready-made tool or another, or how an established design team might respond to different requirements later on.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]