Different markets have different design needs. Luxury consumer brands will be different from enterprise products.
I know an entrepreneur who spent about $5,000 on professional branding for a bootstrapped enterprise product. And the design did look very professional and creditable.
Two things went wrong:
1) He needed to build new landing pages, etc., on a regular basis, and these rarely looked as professional as the basic branding. So despite spending a lot of money, his site didn't look ultra-professional—at best, it looked competent. And that's not good enough to justify $5,000 in a bootstrapped startup.
2) He spent the $5,000 before proving that he could actually close sales.
In this case, I'd say that the $5,000 was spent prematurely. He could have purchased a lower-cost logo and spent a day browsing themeforest, and he would have wound up with something 80% as good for under $500. And that would have been enough to start e-mailing his industry contacts and trying to get his first sale. Getting that first sale was his biggest priority, because it would prove he had a real business.
So before deciding whether to hire a designer, ask yourself: Is looking professional the best use of your money right now? And what happens if you need to change your sales pitch significantly, or even pivot? Does your designer understand UX, advertising, copywriting, or do they just make logos and stationary? Can you afford to keep paying them? How bad are your own design skills?
A lot of people disagreeing here, but let's face it, people are proving you wrong every day. A generic design can get you a long way at the start.
Take Paras' visual website optimizer[1] as an example. Originally built using simpla admin[2], you can still see a screenshot on his blog, it worked well, he's now paid for a designer.
Perfectly good when he started out. Craig's list has also been mentioned. There's a DNS service who's name escapes me that's had a god awful design for ages but people rave about their customer service.
Design is a differentiator, not a must have. Would Google have won if they'd have got a designer in?
The massive caveat is that you need to buy a template that is well written. If you don't you're in for a lot of cleaning up work. That means that you must at least be competent with html to inspect the source or be lucky.
To be honest Simpla Admin rocks and that intersection of the right look and quality underlying html/css does take some hunting.
Even a brief glance is not enough, one of the themes I bought I ended up spending a few hours rewriting bits of it because the performance sucked due to overuse of cufon and jQuery. I wish I'd spent another 15 minutes checking out the code as I ended up chopping up quite a bit of it.
In my experience a designer isn't as much useful for simple designs or "look and feel" so much as the design process helps you along product-market fit. When my co-founder and I started building our company, we made sure we followed the process of user-centric design and took wireframes and mockups and photoshop files to our customers well before we even started coding.
We would have completely missed our market if we had just jumped into coding before going after design. In that sense, I think if you don't have the designer chops, hiring a designer to get the good looking wireframes/mockups/etc to start doing customer validation is crucial - probably even more so than the code.
I love your answer... Couple of questions. 1. When did you hire a designer for your iOS app? 2. Was the designer involved in creating wireframes? 3. Are you self funded? If not, then I think, hiring a designer would have been easy.
Bullshit of the highest order. If your only goal is to get a "pretty website" when you hire a designer, not only will you hire the wrong person, but you lose the benefits a good designer can provide. But sure, go ahead and buy that $50 template.
Find someone with familiarity in building good UIs, designing a consistent brand for your product, and making absolutely sure that your product's message comes through clear as day.
The post does not suggest avoiding designers completely. It is about timing. Of course this depends on the type of startup, but in many cases you can absolutely ignore brand message until you have some level of basic functionality and alpha testing done.
False dichotomy. Unless you're saying that a developer is by definition unable to think about design.
A developer might not do as good a job at it as someone who focused their career at it, but I would be surprised if developers couldn't put together something that was at least passable if they put a modicum of effort into it.
I assume that the author of post will switch design and work with a UX engineer when the site starts making money. When you have nothing $50.00 for a theme sounds great. Imagine, no one knows about your site so there is no point in building a site from day one which will scale to handle a million users. Launch first, iterate later.
You've got it in one. Whilst I understand that designers are, rightfully, proud of their profession, it seems odd that guys starting out like me should be expected to shell out $$$$ before even launching.
Find someone with familiarity in building good UIs
I'm inferring from your comment that one can't have basic knowledge of decent UI without being a designer. Surely a coder can have a good idea about how to lay out a decent interface without having the skills to actually do so? It's this missing skill that a theme gives them.
A coder will generally have an idea about how to do so in the same way that a designer can understand how to architect and code a 900kloc enterprise app — it will be very superficial. In general, other people's jobs always look easy because you don't realize how much you actually suck at them.
1. UX does not "just seem easy" to designers. Most are no good at it.
2. "Are all UX specialists designers?" depends entirely on how we define our terms. If we define UX as a design discipline (as is common, since it basically is), then yes, by definition. If we define it as something else, then no.
I assume for the purposes of this discussion, design and usability have been melded into a single concept. However, sability principles are certainly something a developer can learn and scientifically derive. The SIGCHI proceedings are a great resource.
Making that attractive is a completely different skillset and one I certainly don't have. However, based on the amount of flowery yet wholly unusable crap I come across, it seems many designers don't really have a good handle on usability either. Getting someone great at both is a rare find indeed, but it's not as if there's this huge cognitive gap between the two.
This is kind of what I'm talking about. There is some subset of usability principles that you can "learn and scientifically derive" without actually delving in and becoming a usability expert, but that just makes you the UX equivalent of a cowboy coder hired because his uncle heard he knew computer stuff — you might get stuff done, but you will not be a substitute for an expert unless you actually become one.
Well, on the other hand, I've grown weary of "UX" experts that think that means just making things look pretty. The term HCI shouldn't be foreign to them. Usability studies shouldn't just be grabbing three colleagues and asking them what they think (few ever even get that far). There is a lot of psychology that goes into usability. I'll take someone that studies that over someone that only reads other usability blogs (i.e., an echo chamber) any day of the week.
And again, I contend there are people that do both extraordinarily well. And then there's a ton that think they can, on both sides of the fence.
And I perhaps chose the incorrect term in saying "derive" earlier. I don't think conducting a usability study is going to magically surface a design for you. You need some sort of background to influence your hypotheses. But you can test and measure usability and you don't need to be well-versed in CSS 3 or Photoshop to do so was more my point. And you can draw upon well-established principles to get yourself started.
And if a designer had a working product after the "architect" part, you'd see a lot more designer-only apps being built.
The fact is that a coder CAN get a working product up without the design-equivalent of "coding". They can lay out a UI just as well as an average professional designer (I would know), but the execution will certainly fall short of an average professional designer (I would know).
With that said, I'd always prefer to hire an excellent designer before building a UI, but I rarely will because I like to build more than I like perfect UIs.
If the execution falls short, I wouldn't say they did it just as well. Would you say a coder who creates a bug-ridden ball of spaghetti is just as good at programming as one who writes clean, correct, bug-free code, but just doesn't execute as well?
"Occasionally they overlap in an individual" and "Surely a coder can have a good idea about how to lay out a decent interface" are basically the same sentence.
So essentially using a similar logic, if I am a designer, I am better off using a scripting tool to make Facebook Clone than hire a developer?
I know this comes off as an arrogant comment but I am drawing the logic straight from your arguments here.
A developer cannot design so the best option they have is to use templates of design created with no clear audience, and goal other than probably looking good (which is not in the least way what design is about).
Similarly, then if I am a designer then I should just use free scripts that let me make a social networking clone or delicious clone for my next project, right?
I think it's a bit different coming from the other end, unfortunately. Craigslist has come quite far without what we would all consider "design" (though that's debatable - functionality is design). Alas, traditional aesthetic design has never found its way to Craigslist.
As a designer, you might find scripts / examples / tutorials that work, but without understanding the entire web stack it's going to be difficult to even get an "MVP" running. If I asked some designer friends to go set up a server to run Django, they probably wouldn't know where to start (though some would hunker down and truly figure it out, they would be the exception).
My opinion is that "decent design" is easier to achieve than "decent functionality". Don't get me wrong, I'm all for professional design and appreciate every minute that goes into it - every single app I've built over the past few years was started by an awesome designer (even my no-revenue side projects).
For the developer, though, things like http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap are helping us get very far into an app without asking designers for favors (or paying someone).
FWIW I am fairly comfortable in setting up Django so despite that there are a thousand things beyond the gettting it to run. Things like DB, hell even the basic DB choice. For a current project I along with the developer (my brother) realised that we were better off using MongoDB than use MySQL for our quick random features in very near future.
Again I cannot imagine doing this without a developer. At the same time things like Product Design and User Experience (note I am not even touching User Interface- which is what ou get with templates) require a certain level of detail that are perhaps better served by a designer who does this day in day out.
It appears that the general consensus is that just getting it out there is good enough reason to call it an MVP. I think this post from 37Signals nails it down as to what happens to user experience in an MVP http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2963-what-happens-to-user-exp...
A developer cannot design so the best option they have is to use templates of design created with no clear audience, and goal other than probably looking good...
If that if the developer doesn't know what he's developing or for whom, they're in trouble ;)
If you know how to use photoshop, you can design. You can make a website that works and that you can test with.
But if a designer knows nothing about code, knowing where to start and how to put the pieces together would be daunting. Coding has a very steep learning curve, whereas even amateurs can start designing right away.
Professional designers are all about beating up any designer that does spec work on sites like 99designs. They're freaking out (rightly so) about it dropping the value of their work. Just like pro photographers are freaking about microstock sites like iStockphoto and the serious pro-am photographer that's happy to get $100 to shoot a wedding.
Hiring a contract designer is never an optimization, whether you're bootstrapping or neck-deep in venture capital.
Startups are all about learning and iterating quickly. Your contract designer won't help you with that. When you need them to pump out the next iteration, they'll be working on another project and available in two weeks. No, you need those skills in-house.
If you can't persuade a designer to join your team (and man, this is hard when you're bootstrapping), the best course of action is to learn some these skills yourself. Even if it's slow, and even if it's hard.
Of course, this is exactly the same argument we've all made and read a million times before, except with s/developer/designer.
That 'ugh' feeling some of you are feeling at the prospect of learning to design? Yeah, that's the same way the guy spinning his wheels looking for a technical co-founder feels, when you tell him to learn to code. Still got to be done.
All depends on what you consider a designer. In many ways, I think product guy should know design--the full circle of it. I continue to see startups that hire designers who believe design is a PSD sent to the team to be converted and brought live. That is failure barring exceptional circumstances.
Using a downloadable theme on your product is somewhat akin to using Wordpress to program your web app. The compromises will be dictated by the CMS/Theme, instead of you being able to call the shots
Say you need a tool to reorder categories. You know the best way to do this would be with drag and drop, but the theme only has table views! So you place an "order" field in a table view and hope for the best.
Then you realize that having a line chart for displaying open cases in a bug tracker is stupid, but it's the only view you have so you stick with it.
All these little compromises form an incredibly expensive form of technical debt, and pretty soon you have a product that users wouldn't touch with a stick. It's better to have an ugly product that works well than a pretty product that's a pain to use.
Or you use the base styling to create whatever custom widgets you happen to need. The kind of themes I'd use in this situation give you reusable UI components and basic layouts that you can modify to your specific needs while still retaining consistency across the app.
My experience has been that a bootstrapping startup cannot afford to keep a designer on staff, and as a developer I'd much rather work with template components that are designed to be reused and moved around than a fixed design delivered by a contract designer that's not as flexible.
Say you need a tool to reorder categories. You know the best way to do this would be with drag and drop, but the theme only has table views! So you place an "order" field in a table view and hope for the best.
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very good point, I've been bitten by this one before
This is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of “design”.
Steve Jobs: “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. [...] It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
I don't understand why the OP is getting so much hate here. He is clearly talking about a specific kind of situation - a solo programmer with little money trying to build a web app - where design can be a costly overhead. It is also clear that he's talking about design in the sense of making things look beautiful, not in the sense of how things work.
Even more generally speaking, good visual design can be a powerful advantage but it's by no means necessary, especially on the web. See Bingo Card Creator, Visual Website Optimizer, Dropbox, Google, Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist, etc.
Design is not just the way your product looks, it's how it works and how people interact with it. Unless you're building something without a user interface, design is a critical part of your product, and if you ignore it, you're setting yourself up for failure.
You don't need to have a degree from art school to be a designer, just like you dont need a CS degree to write code. You can learn the basic tenants of typography, grid systems, and usability on your own. Whether or not you hire a "designer," design thinking should be part of the process of product development from day one.
Again with the absolutes ... in some cases this is true, in some cases it is not ... if you're going into a market that's established and you want to make a splash, do you think that going in with a theme forest page is going to get you the buzz you need or get you laughed out of town?
It would be nice if you could always say ... x + y = z, but that isn't the way the world works ... having a nice design out the gate can get you far enough to be worth that extra $5k that you invest in it.
It just depends.
I agree. A professionally designed site would be ideal but it shouldn't be the first thing you concentrate on. First prove the business, then sort out the design.
I guess the rule of thumb would be: pay the designer out of profits - no profits, no designer [1]
[1] and just to pre-empt the counter-arguments: a good product will survive a mediocre design; a great design won't save a bad product.
This may work for the web, but for mobile I would argue a good designer is as important, if not more so, than a good developer. I'm speaking as a developer who has realized this and hired a designer. Best business decision I've ever made.
Designers are best at finding attractive looks. User Interface design (aka, usability) was a computer science specialty long long before it was a thing people with degrees that have anything to do with photoshop or color have been doing it.
I constantly see designers put out things that are non-standard and unintuitive (I work in the iPhone world). I don't want to hear any "no-true scotsman" about that how they're bad designers, they're not. "Design" people generally come from information display background, not interactivity design background. Interactivity was a discipline that came from ergo and HCI researchers, not design schools.
But usability is different than information display. They throw expensive, non-functional items out there all the time, as well as ridiculous control schemes that work like crap.
For this reason alone, ignoring designers, and at best working with a usability expert, could be productive, but worrying about people who specialize in visual appeal and just try to stick onto interaction design because it sounds good on a resume is a bit rich.
UX as a field sucks because too many people who were taught to make pretty things are putting on airs as if they have an education on making things that work well. Actual usability people (with training and all that) are gems usually. If you don't know how to do a usability study, with controls and all that, you're probably missing a few things to prove yourself as a user interaction designer.
Yes and no. By design I also mean interaction with the product, animations, etc. Animations that you've written for the first design draft might not make sense anymore with the new design. So new code required. So is for markup and JS code. If new design requires new elements on the page, this may break your JS that relies on certain structure.
Animations? Did I miss where every startup is now a game company?
Animations are an unnecessary complexity that get in the way far more often than they enhance UX. If you're doing animation in a first-pass UI, you're doing it wrong.
> If you're doing animation in a first-pass UI, you're doing it wrong.
I have to disagree. If you are slapping in some animation eye candy after the fact, you are doing it wrong.
Animation's purpose is to explain the environment to the user. An environment void of animation has to use other metaphors to explain the surroundings, leading to completely different designs. At that point it is difficult to start to incorporate animation with real purpose.
It is not necessarily bad to design an interface without animations. Some computer systems cannot easily support animations. However, animations can give you some design liberties if animations are a core feature of your design; to add them later is too late.
Just on your last point - it may be that usability issues are not simply visual, but relate to fundamental programming design choices. For example you may have decided to use tagging to categorise information, where people find another system easier in that context.
Let's look at it this way... Someone is an indie developer working late nights and he/she wants to release a web app and see what happens. They have the money for hosting and coding skills. If the web app gains traction and makes money, then they could think about hiring an UX engineer.
It makes sense when it comes to building web apps. I don't think it works when you are building an iOS app. Is there a site which sells iOS app themes?
I'm not sure I agree with that. Instapaper is very successful in spite of having a fairly basic design (I seem to recall Marco saying he had never used a designer). On that small of a form factor, I think usefulness trumps flashy any day.
If you're doing a game, or something graphics-rich, that would be a different story.
This makes no sense. A proper product lifecycle begins with design!
I agree.
This is the fundamental reason why companies like Apple are so successful.
I don't think citing the most extreme example helps your previous argument. It'd be better if you could say company x is successful because of design and yet company x's main specialty isn't design.
I have never heard of ThemeForest before, but this site looks absolutely AMAZING! I feel i'm fairly capable of creating a design myself, but most of the time It probably is not the best place to put my efforts. This looks like a great way to get 70% of the effort done (only spending my time doing some slight tweaks).
This is fantastically bad advice, unless you're working on a weekend project and don't care about traction.
I would counter that a simple concept executed with design thinking informing the development is both practical and far more likely to succeed than yet another random solo developer's SaaS.
The problem is that there's two issues at play: the visual theme elements and the user experience. Sure, go ahead and buy a $14 theme if that gets you the head start you need to start working on solving a real problem for someone.
Except that's where the hard work begins. It's not your ability to style INPUT elements that is being tested, but your product vision and how people move through a workflow that is easy to understand.
In the early days of a SaaS, design and copy are probably 75% of the hard work in a MVP. Find me a successful startup that wishes they'd spend less energy on design thinking and just written more code and I'll revisit my perspective.
Otherwise I'll make the statement that any idea which doesn't deserve the attention of a design thinker is not likely to get off the ground because it's statistically not solving a hair-on-fire problem anyhow. Put differently: there's projects and there's start-ups. Start-ups are hard. If you're going to start-up, your future users appreciate you thinking about how your product makes them feel.
I know an entrepreneur who spent about $5,000 on professional branding for a bootstrapped enterprise product. And the design did look very professional and creditable.
Two things went wrong:
1) He needed to build new landing pages, etc., on a regular basis, and these rarely looked as professional as the basic branding. So despite spending a lot of money, his site didn't look ultra-professional—at best, it looked competent. And that's not good enough to justify $5,000 in a bootstrapped startup.
2) He spent the $5,000 before proving that he could actually close sales.
In this case, I'd say that the $5,000 was spent prematurely. He could have purchased a lower-cost logo and spent a day browsing themeforest, and he would have wound up with something 80% as good for under $500. And that would have been enough to start e-mailing his industry contacts and trying to get his first sale. Getting that first sale was his biggest priority, because it would prove he had a real business.
So before deciding whether to hire a designer, ask yourself: Is looking professional the best use of your money right now? And what happens if you need to change your sales pitch significantly, or even pivot? Does your designer understand UX, advertising, copywriting, or do they just make logos and stationary? Can you afford to keep paying them? How bad are your own design skills?