Design is Horseshit

A startup blogger writes a polemic with a blatantly baiting headline. Within 24 hours, another startup blogger will write a rebuttal with an equally baiting headline. Both will incite winding debates on Hacker News.<p>Meanwhile, other people will somehow manage to create value, ostensibly the goal of both bloggers, without writing confrontational screeds, perhaps even writing insightful blog posts intended to inspire and challenge rather than stir up conflict.<p>Maybe it's writing polemics that is horseshit.

This stuff was bizarre to me:<p>&#62; Design enhances value, it does not create it. Stop creating shitty startups that <i>look</i> amazing.<p>&#62; It is to a massive degree much, much easier to spend a week pushing <i>pixels</i> to create something <i>beautiful</i><p>&#62; If there’s one thing you can rely on everyone having an opinion on, it’s how something should <i>look</i>.<p>(my emphasis)<p>The author's conniption would appear to be around graphic design. Graphic design is a subset of design, and covers nothing close to the full scope of what goes into the design of a new product. Design is about <i>how things work</i> and, often, what feelings they evoke in the process. How they look can be a part of that, but it needn't always be.<p>For example: how delightful is it to work with a great API? Something straightforward, well-documented, but nonetheless powerful? It's such a joy. But it requires effort: planning, understanding, experimentation, adjustment, refining, etc. In a word, design.<p>As a test, consider the following:<p>Is it first engine <i>design</i> or is it engine making? Airframe <i>design</i> or airframe building? Circuit <i>design</i> or circuit assembly? You can't <i>make</i> the engine until someone <i>designs</i> it first. How it looks doesn't much matter – how it works is non-negotiably essential.<p>Something that <i>works well</i> is said to be well-designed. Something that merely <i>looks</i> nice can be pretty – and terribly designed.<p>So a startup can't have something be both shitty and well-designed at the same time.<p>The notion that design is a differentiating characteristic for startups comes from the fact that many incumbent products <i>simply do not work well</i>. By designing a product that addresses a given workflow faster, with greater convenience, with greater fun, you're making something that works better.<p>We're past the point where you can build technology that fits requirements and stop there. Everyone else has done that already. Now success comes in making things that are satisfying, not obnoxious, that are easily learned, that make users excited to show their friends.<p>tl;dr: Someone doesn't grasp the difference between design and making nice graphics, throws a tantrum of a non-sequitur.

Design is clarity.<p>Design is intention.<p>Design is function.<p>Design is appeal.<p>And, sure, design is appearance.<p>It should be no surprise that, yes, if you can pump enough raw "value" into something, however you care to define value, that you can ignore or short shrift design. Go ahead, limit your chances by killing your first impressions. Write poorly in your presentations while you are at it.<p>I mean if gold starts pouring out of your user's computer's USB ports when they load up your web page, you're right. They won't care what the background color is or what that blob in your logo is supposed to represent. If the reward is high enough, they'll kill themselves finding that magic button among all the log ins, captchas, and cryptic navigation tools.<p>But if you're trying to sell a new idea, one that may be unfamiliar, or if your "value" depends on the size of your user base, you might want to spent the time and effort to respect your user enough to make it clear what you intend to do. And what's in it for them.<p>Good ideas, and value, are sometimes not enough. They require a context to be useful and <i>acceptable</i>. Good engineers know this.<p>And, sometimes, a nice little shrubbery, in <i>just</i> the right place, and a splash of color, can make all the difference.

Fun rant. I wish he defined what exactly he means by design. (Amusing exercise: replace all occurrences of 'design' with 'blub'.) The core of the post for me was:<p>&#62; Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing. A product or service that is indispensably useful yet looks like ass is infinitely more likely to be successful than a product that solves zero problems but looks like a work of art.<p>I'd say sure, in general, though that does beg the question for what problems so many "useless" but successful apps solve. (Mindless entertainment, I guess.) More importantly, though, "design" and functionality and usefulness are not at odds.<p>For some fun (probably less comprehensible) rantings in the other direction, have a look at <a href="http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2011/05/engineers-are-inferior-form-of-life.html" rel="nofollow">http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2011/05/engineers-are-infe...</a> and <a href="http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2011/06/design-principles-vs-engineering.html" rel="nofollow">http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2011/06/design-principles-...</a>

And yet Apple is/was the most valuable company in the world, largely due to design.<p>Saying "design is horseshit" makes about as much sense as saying "engineering is horseshit" or "writing well is horseshit". Read: it makes absolutely no sense.

Design is not a pretty facade to a product, and designers aren't just responsible for aesthetics. Design is as much about how the product works as how it looks, and a designer worth their stock options understands that they aren't drawing pretty pictures of websites, they're designing with a purpose: to create an enjoyable experience and ultimately a functional, beautiful product that adds value to users lives.

Alright Captain Obvious.<p>Design alone is horseshit. Engineering alone is horshit. Blogging alone is horseshit. Marketing alone is horseshit.<p>But put these together in the right proportion and you get a beautiful product. The proportion depends on your product/service. It takes a lot less selling, if the visual design of the product is impressive. It releases dopamine in your customer's head which urges them to put their credit card number in the checkout form. It may not be important for enterprise product as the person signing the cheque does not use your product. But it is vital for consumer and small business based products. But I agree with the author that pretty design is not a substitute for good engineering, good customer support or good marketing.

Design is not just about pixel pushing and pixel perfecting. It is more than that. The blogger purely equates design = making things pretty, which is not true.<p>Design starts from understanding and empathizing with the user. Design helps to shape the product and connect with the users emotionally.<p>The Design Fund highlights the importance of designers in startups not just because they make things look pretty. Designers are usually trained to understand users emotionally. An engineer look at a problem and start using equations to solve it. A designer look at a problem, start by understanding the user, and develop a way to solve it.<p>Design teams in big companies have User Researchers (on the ground, understanding users, find out needs, etc), User Experience Designers (connecting the dots from research to product, how the product should function and flow), Interaction Designers (that transition effect you see in iOS? not just pretty. Helps users to orientate where they are at), Visual Designers (make things pretty).<p>As you can see, in the whole field of design, only Visual Designers are the ones who really make things pretty. Once again, The Design Fund values designers because they look at things differently, and they can build products with emotion. (Apple products have a lot of emotion tied to people)<p>*I am not part of The Design Fund.

Design != making things beautiful.<p>In fact, the design community faces a huge problem because almost everyone thinks design == make things beautiful and that is one of the things that has been holding back design in startups for so long.<p>commieneko said it well:<p>"Design is clarity. Design is intention. Design is function. Design is appeal. And, sure, design is appearance."<p>So yes, spending a ton of time altering the drop shadow on your button and the RGB value of your logo might be time wasted in a startup. But spending time clarifying what your product does, or devising a smoother way to onboard users, or figuring out a way to highlight your more expensive plan, or any number of other things good designers are thinking about while also "making things beautiful" is not wasting time.

&#62; I love good design and I am good at design. But I’ve never called myself a designer.<p>&#62; 1. Designers tweet and blog<p>&#62; 2. Design is a cheap way to appear like you’re creating value<p>...<p>&#62; I’ve created products / services in the past that have garnered praise for their design.<p>&#62; 3. Everyone’s a fucking designer now<p>Face it, you're a designer.<p>&#62; Design enhances value, it does not create it. Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing.<p>I don't understand how enhancing value doesn't create value. Value is value, there isn't good value and bad value, there's only more or less of it. If pushing pixels does a better job enhancing value than creating features then I am absolutely going to (have someone else) design the shit out of that product.<p>I see design much like I see testing. Both of these are meant to build integrity in your product. Design is perceived integrity, while testing is conceptual. If you don't proactively maintain the integrity then the lack of quality compounds. Treating them like a second class citizen will do nothing but cause troubles.

"The Design of Everyday Things" talks primarily about functionality, and frames <i>design</i> so broadly as to be almost indistinguishable from "solving a user problem".<p>As an example, Roy Fielding describes the URLs that a RESTful webservice includes in its representation of a resource (for what transitions are available to other states) as "affordances". It could even be argued that Codd's relational model was a better "design" for thinking about databases, which he presented in terms of the problem of data models being too closely coupled with storage representation.<p>Of course, even this broad sense of design doesn't address whether there's a market for a solution; but it does address whether you can make a solution that's <i>better</i>. I can see the sense in seeking a problem that needs to be solved - in being "market-driven"... but personally, I'm much more excited about creating something better (which is only possible when you already know the problem and some existing solution, because "better than" takes two operands). And that seems to be the history of all the products I admire.

The author makes some interesting points but should be more specific that he is referring to Aesthetic Design.<p>Design is everywhere not just in the shiny stuff. Design is a workflow, response, messaging, interaction... These are all areas of design you might not be able to see immediately but are often the key components of making a great product.<p>My guess is that every one of the companies he considers successful had good design baked into their products somewhere (even if they had terrible aesthetics).<p>To categorize all design in this way is very misleading to those starting a company.

Updated:<p><i>Some final words on this. Some people have interpreted this as me not understanding the value of good design. I assure you I do from experience, tweet at me if you want specifics.<p>However - create value before exploring how design can enhance the experience. Solve a real customer problem. If you’re an early stage startup with no revenue, don’t even think about design! Think hard about what problem you can solve that a customer will give you $10 for and work your ass off at delivering that $10 of value as fast and as cheaply as possible. It doesn’t even matter if you’re not aiming to make a paid service. If people won’t give you money to solve their problems, it’s not a real fucking problem. It’s just another novelty echo-chamber startup that you might get a chance to flip to a bigger fish if you win the startup lottery. Don’t be an idiot and buy into that. Solve a problem, live forever. The idea that design is what early stage startups should be busying their time with is a notion I find utterly wrong.</i><p><a href="http://yongfook.com/post/14295124427/design-is-horseshit" rel="nofollow">http://yongfook.com/post/14295124427/design-is-horseshit</a>

While that's a ridiculously trolling headline, I agree with the argument. I'm a designer(check my profile) and my job is to communicate ideas and products not create them.

It sounds like he is attacking a straw man. It doesn’t seem like anyone is making the arguments he is attacking, especially not on the page he is linking to and saying he is responding to. Specifically (for example) no one seems to claim that designers are “the new kings of startups”.

Although I may agree with the premise in the article, I'm sick of this meme like quality of HN headlines. Must we parrot popular, sensationalist headlines to get a point across? The purpose of these articles is to stir up enough controversy to get to the front page of HN.

This article hits a note with the startup community. It actually redefines design from "look &#38; feel" to "practicality". IMO this is a much needed awakening, given all the media hoopla around path's new button. Nobody buys buttons.

Every reductive reasoning is horseshit. Someone needs to write an article about: "Start ups are frequently so complex that their behavior is emergent: it cannot be deduced from the properties of the elements alone."

Another individual conflating design with aesthetic styling. The article has plenty of merit but it is lost in the continuing abuse of what the practice of design is.

I think people are missing the whole point.<p>The author is not suggesting not having quality design. He isn't even saying design isn't an itegral part of product development.<p>he's saying everyone is skipping step one, namely figure out what problem you're going to solve. No one asks the proverbial question 'How is my product going to get them laid' (to paraphrase jwz) They just skip straight to having a great way of doing the same exact thing everyone else does just as well.

The author of this post is so misguided it boggles the mind… I'm a developer, but I chose to study design in college rather than computer science, because in my opinion design is much harder to master than programming is, and can be a much greater catalyst to success than pure engineering alone can be.<p>I see design as an enabler. Engineering is where the heavy lifting is done, but design is what makes that possible. I hate to bring up Apple as an example, but when you look at, for example, Siri: voice recognition, understanding grammar and meaning within human sentences and the all technology behind it is fantastic engineering. But what differentiates Siri from anything else out there is the design. The fact that the AI has a personality, that it jokes around and does not <i>feel</i> like a machine, that's what makes it accessible to humans and what makes it so insanely great. And that's design.<p>I agree with the author to the extend that glossy buttons and a textured background does not a good product make. Indeed, there's a lot of good-looking crap out there—but that's not design, and the author's argument that that's what design is makes him look like an ignorant fool.

Wrote a brief response here: <a href="http://enriqueallen.tumblr.com/post/14480645124/design-both-creates-and-enhances-value" rel="nofollow">http://enriqueallen.tumblr.com/post/14480645124/design-both-...</a> Here's a couple excerpts: “Focus on value creation. Design enhances value, it does not create it.” This statement represents the core contradiction and flaw in his argument which barely makes this discussion worth having. Let’s look at the word “creation” which is a fascinating word generally associated with “the action or process of bringing something into existence.” So if you re-write the sentence with this definition, it becomes, “focus on the action or process of bringing value into existence.” But what comes before an action or process whether conscious or subconscious in your DNA? Design. Borrowing from a Google definition, design means, “purpose, planning, or intention that exists or is thought to exist behind an action, fact, or material object.” Therefore to create value one must design how to do it, thus making the rest his post null.<p>If you agree with the flawed logic of Jon then you must substitute the word “Design” with any discipline concerning the action or behavior of creating value. Thus making a series of useless posts like “Engineering is Horseshit” and so on. You don’t see the design community getting mad at engineers who spend weeks designing an optimal database sharding strategy for building things like a daily-deal aggregator which has 0 users and a growth rate of “Divide by Zero Error” and no viable user acquisition strategy. Of course entrepreneurs should focus on value creation and finding product market fit before spending an inappropriate amount of energy on other activities whether that be visual design or backend infrastructure. Any entrepreneur I invest in should know that elementary lesson from experience or reading the Lean Startup etc.

There may well be many startups which have a great design and no substance - but then there is also the situation where multiple startups exist in a similar space competing for traction - and in that situation having the design 'edge' is never a bad thing..<p>Personally I find myself in that situation, early stage startup where whilst I have the tech background, design has never come easily to me (and my co-founders are even worst). As we have bootstrapped we didnt have the money for great design and did the best we could! That said it hasnt been the make or break as we have executed well, however first impressions always count... and when looking for investment we have more than once had potential investors misjudge how far we have come or compare us negatively to others in our space as we did not have the design 'edge'. Its a shame, but its a fact of life appearances mean a lot..<p>Perhaps off topic but be interesting to know how others have managed to overcome gaps in skillsets when bootstrapping? we dont seem to have any contacts with good design skills and available time..

Great post. The only thing I disagree with is your distaste for the designer fund. I think helping designers build startups is a good thing. And it's also important to note the difference between visual design (UI) and UX. You can't create value without good UX. And good designers do both UI and UX. So design is important, the visual aspect not so much, before you have something ppl want

Design is a buzzword these days. And as a result I have no idea what this guy is railing against.

[Edit: I wrote this while thinking that we're debating "design" without a common defintion. I've made an attempt to express two different sides of "design".]<p>Those who aren't building the product often can't express ideas about what they don't see or know about. To them, the design is the surface, the user interface. So naturally they assume that if they want to create a product with "good" design, they should hire someone who does the visual part, and make their product look just like other products that they think are well designed.<p>If you want a good counter-example, about good design that is very subtle and runs very deep, read "The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance" by Henry Petroski.

Horseshit has been getting a pretty bad rap lately.

Lean Startup has been, for the most part, a trojan horse to get design thinking into engineering driven organizations. Everything the lean startup movement talks about with getting out of the building and customer validation is essentially principles of good user research that the design community has been advocating for since forever.<p>It's unfortunate that designers still have to battle ignorant misconceptions that their work is about pushing pixels and making things look pretty. At it's heart, design is exactly what this article is advocating for; understanding a deep user need and developing an elegant experience that fulfills that need.

Design is how it works, not just how it looks.

<i>If you’re an early stage startup with no revenue, don’t even think about design! Think hard about what problem you can solve that a customer will give you $10 for and work your ass off at delivering that $10 of value as fast and as cheaply as possible.</i><p>I don't understand what the author is so riled up about. Why not just delegate responsibilities? Let a designer focus on design, while the engineers focus on the actual product. Does it hurt to have a designer? I don't see why it would.<p>Good luck trying to sell something to the general public that looks horrid. No matter how well it works.

An obvious conclusion if your definition of design is "how something looks". I would suggest that your attitude would doom any startup relying on a human to machine interface to failure. Without a focus on designing for useability or user experience I would argue that your startup will not solve any users problem, as they will give up on even trying to use it. So I think anyone giving credence to you views with respect to their startup will quickly find themselves with a lot of wasted effort and a pile of horseshit.

This is a silly article. It once makes the fatal mistake of equating design with "pushing pixels". Solving the problem is part of the design process. Silly linkbait is silly.<p>Did I mention it's silly?

"I’ve created products / services in the past that have garnered praise for their design."<p>...you've also [wisely?] abandoned projects that had great promise without to due diligence necessary to hand them off to a willing steward (Sweetcron).<p>I was pleased to see your domain here on HN, but I still have a bitter taste after being forced to abandon Sweetcron in favor of Chyrp. Regardless, I've been quite impressed by what you've delivered thus far and am pleased to see your weight provided in the direction of reason.

It's an interesting rant - and quite amusing, but it sounds like the author is debating against aesthetically pleasing visual design, rather than design in general.<p>Graphic design is visual engineering.<p>Sometimes the value proposition put forward by a company is 'a way to [do x] <i>better</i>'; if better is equivalent to 'more efficiently', 'more cheaply' or 'more easily' - chances are design is going to be factor that allows the change to happen.

I like his article. He's right. You should first solve the problem, then enhance it with great look and feel. Making it accessible.<p>The update is worthy to read too.

I am continually baffled, on almost a daily basis, that people continue to argue extremes. The secret to most things in life is balance. A balance between having a great product that solves problems, and good design, is the key. Sure, you can have success on both ends, but to truly shine you need a good balance of both.<p>Why is such a simple concept so hard for people to understand in practice?

I call my self a designer, and i bet i assist in every other business process more valuable. I think you're mixing up the college kid who messes in photoshop and the evolved interaction designer/ui/all print media etc.<p>There is huge value in being able to communicate problems visually that comes with the experience provided by being a designer early career.

“Solve a real customer problem.”<p>This is exactly what design is.

Design is the saddle, the ride, and the journey.<p>Articles like this are the real droppings. The submitter merely the bowels.

Holy cow what an ill-informed article. Many on this thread have illuminated it's weaknesses, here's my two cents.<p>To single out design from any other process involved in creating value makes zero sense. In fact in many products design, including visual design is a key differentiator that actually gives the product value (think iPod vs all other mp3 players).<p>Only programmers or engineers creating extemely cutting edge products that have no competitors could take this attitude than design issues can be set aside till later. What serious person would consider starting a business without incorporating design from the beginning?<p>Whatever meme out there about design being an edge in a startup is responding to what I see is an incorrect undervaluing of design in the tech community.<p>Another subtext in the discussion is many tech start ups are making software, web based or otherwise. On a typical program huge amounts of value are delivered as pixels. The user interface is also pixels. A lot of software are tools. Graphic design is mandatory for the thing to exist! Widgets are make or break whether a software tool even works at all.<p>I use audio software in my job (all day) and many competing applications in this space are at feature parity. UI and Ux is what separate apps that work really well from apps that are painfully slow and frustrating to use. Just consider how color is used in a complex app. It communicates feedback, breaks up function grouping, it helps you find and remember features, it provides a hopefully not unpleasant visual experience since one is staring at for extended periods. I think we are in the Dark Ages of human computer interaction and that bad visual design is a huge contributor to the problem.<p>BTW, anyone have examples of web services with great design don't offer value?

Linkbait is Horseshit. See the irony? If it wasn't for the manner in which you communicated I and many others probably would've never seen your article on top of HN, let alone read it, even if it did have "value". Design isn't everything, but it's definitely not horseshit.

Some Startups with bad Design have managed to do very well (Craigslist, Ebay etc), but doesn't mean all the startups with bad design will do well. Good Design is necessary, it is what makes you subconsciously love something and use it more often.

It's not what design looks like, rather it's how you use it that helps to determine value. Otherwise it's a work of art.<p>Design with utility has inherent value that can be quantified. It's silly to categorically say design is horseshit.

You keep using that word. I don't think this word means what you think it means.

+1, but lets not confuse "how it looks" with the people crafting groupon's experience to maximize conversions. world-class designers are more than pixel-pushers, and pixel-pushers aren't world-class designers.

You could write the exact same rant about engineers in response to an info graphic titled "Did you know about billions worth of value created by tech startups with <i>technical</i> co-founders?"

Can anyone care to explain, what do you consider design? It's pretty amazing to see how a word can have different meaning for everyone and being debated.

I wrote a response to this:<p><a href="http://bokardo.com/archives/design-is-not-horsepoop/" rel="nofollow">http://bokardo.com/archives/design-is-not-horsepoop/</a>

The whole thing is a strawman. The blogger defined design as a "nice looking user interface" and then proceeded to knock it over.

This is such a short-minded and troll post, surprised it didn't get deleted.

+1 for the use of the word "Horseshit." That's all...

<i>everything</i> is horseshit.

1. Step into a public place almost anywhere in the world.<p>2. Count the number of Apple devices in use. White earbuds are a dead giveaway.<p>3. Go hire a designer that knows what they're doing and try and accomodate their ideas into those of engineering without making a capon out of anyone.<p>4. Keep iterating.