This was the premise for a new blog post, but nobody reads my blog and I'm interested in other peoples opinions.<p>Consider you're working on a new web startup. You need to hire one designer and one programmer. You have four applications and each candidate is completely devoted your product, 2 are rockstars and 2 are average. Due to budget limitations, you can only take one rockstar. Which do you take, the UX rockstar or the programming rockstar?
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.
It depends on the complexity and difficulty of your app. If it's very difficult to create then get the rockstar programmer with hopefully some average UX skills.<p>If your app is not that complicated to make and intuitiveness matters a lot than get the UX guy.<p>When you refer to UX guy do you mean he's a designer? Can't you give the programmer instructions for the UI? For example, I'm great with UX but I'm neither a designer, nor a programmer. I'm a perfectionist and I want the products to be as easy to use as possible, or to look very good.
Since I consider myself a UI/UX designer, this surprised me, but I'm gonna say hire the programmer.<p>Reason being, you've just started and need to iterate quickly to get something valuable working. It doesn't matter if it looks good if it's not something people want.<p>Once you're up and running, and collecting user feedback, you'll have the data a great UX designer needs to work with.
Contract the UX design. Have a UX designer provide you with wireframes and functional specs. Have a artist (it may be the UX designer) provide you with a PSD comp. Hire the programmer to implement the UI as designed.