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Hacker News isn't a business. It's a site. A business has to make a profit.

• unalone 18y ago
  But 37signals is making a profit. Quite a lot of a profit. So after they're making money, isn't it their choice whether or not to follow their gut? Obviously the results are working for them.
  • ryanwaggoner 18y ago
    Of course it's their choice. That doesn't mean it's the optimal choice or one to be admired.
    • unalone 18y ago
      Yeah, I get that. The problem is that "optimal" is misleading, because making money isn't the only goal of opening a business. Would you say that David Lynch is a suboptimal director? His movies aren't enormous hits. He hasn't won for Best Movie. But those aren't his goals. Similarly, sometimes the people developing a site have more at stake than maximizing profits. Sometimes they want to make gorgeous web pages or gorgeous processes. And there's no optimal procedure for that. Some people look at it another way. The 37s team obviously treats design as a sort of art rather than an exercise in optimization. As it happens, they make better products (in my opinion) than the people who go the other route. So they serve as a sort of inspiration. That's my point. The argument is not entirely meaningful, because there are two things happening at once, and you can measure the one but not the other.
  • whughes 18y ago
    But not all designs are equal in terms of profit yielded. A business which chooses a design that produces more profit than another design will have more profit. That business will therefore be more successful than one which chooses a less profitable design based on their gut.
    • unalone 18y ago
      Give me a real-world example of two companies, all other things even, that made a similar service where the one that won did so because its designers used metrics rather than "taste".
      • ryanwaggoner 18y ago
        Comparing company A to company B is not entirely useful here, because so many other things are going on. However, there are loads of examples where a company used metrics to drive design for higher profits. Best example is probably Google.
        • unalone 18y ago
          On the flip side is Apple, which doesn't use metrics at all and relies entirely on guy design.
          • ryanwaggoner 18y ago
            Do we have any proof of that? I have to believe that if Apple released a new version of Apple.com that caused a huge overnight drop in their online sales, they'd change it back. If they released a new iTunes Store design that caused sales to dry up, they'd fix it immediately. I'm not saying that every tiny little detail should be driven by the data, just that the goal of a business (even Apple) is profit. To the extent that your design doesn't support that, it's wrong.
            • unalone 18y ago
              It's been stated again and again that Apple doesn't run such tests on their products. They make their products to feel good for them. See, saying that sales are drying up is a completely different thing. You'd be stupid not to change from that. I thought your question was about the intuition-based design process, period, because you can design intuitively and NOT lose all your profit. The 37signals design isn't making sales dry up, for instance, even if they didn't run tests on it. It's subjectively a much better page. Obviously there a "don't do stupid stuff" rule in place, where if intuition is very, very wrong you slap the intuitor and start again.