Designers vs. Developers in Startups – You Need Both!

Feb 16, 2010 By Brian Scates in Business, Design, Tech 4 Comments Tags: 1ftp, Design, development, flickr, startup

Dave McClure at Business Week recently published an article about the value of design to startups, in which I thought he made some good points about how important designers and marketers are to the success of startups and applications. Predictably, this didn’t sit so well with developers like Steve at Big Dumb Dev, whose sarcastic response mockingly fails to think of a single startup where design trumped development. As is so often the case, I think the answer lies somewhere in between.

I disagree with Steve that the success of many/all startups was due to stunning technical achievement. While that’s important, and indeed at the heart of many startups, I think design is too often taken for granted. Perhaps I’m a bit bias being a designer myself, but nobody would want to use your awesome new app if there wasn’t a designer on the front end designing a quality UI. In the case where developers are left to their own devices, usually the app is ugly and unusable. Google as the example of a company that doesn’t need designers or marketers is disingenuous. Google is really a case where they are successful despite poor UI/UX design simply because they are reliable and free. Google Analytics, for example, has serious usability problems and a pretty steep learning curve, but it’s popular because it’s free. If it were not free, it would have a big vulnerability from a competitor who invested in a good UX designer, and it’s one of the reasons John P over at Woopra has a business that can compete with free.

Lets look at Flickr as another example. There’s nothing technically amazing about a photo sharing site (I’m sure there are some achievements in there for scaling and performance, but those apply to any large app), and Flickr wasn’t the first. What made Flickr work was design and marketing. It was EASY, you could make friends and comment on photos, and the result was a social network around a hobby. You wouldn’t need a team of MIT grads to build Flickr, but you would need a team of designers driving product development, making careful decisions about whats needed and whats not, where everything on the site goes, what the interface elements are, etc. Those are key advantages Flickr has over other photo sharing sites, and it’s why Flickr actually makes money while other sites struggle to attract members for a free service.

I’m currently working on a startup myself, 1FTP, where we’re rethinking how we can use FTP connections. FTP has been around forever, and has become a commodity, but it has a tender soft underbelly when it comes to usability because the only people who have been working on FTP products to date are developers. We have an awesome developer on our team, but technical achievement isn’t what’s needed to make a better FTP service. What’s needed is to make FTP simpler, easier, and idiot proof. It should be something that is natural to use, not something we loathe to use. Anyone who’s tried to walk an FTP newbie through the process of connecting to a server over the phone will understand where the difficulty is. The 1FTP team is 1 developer, 2 designers, and that ratio reflects the needs of the product.

I think it’s only natural for everyone on a team to view themselves as indispensable, and that is often the case. Design and marketing alone won’t take 1FTP anywhere without a developer. But in today’s market the inverse is also true – development alone is not enough to make a product people want to use, and designers are a critical part of a product’s success. If you’re building a startup for consumers it’s essential to make an investment in a good UI designer, and the earlier you bring them into the process the better.

The coming revolt against Apple

Aug 11, 2009 By Brian Scates in Tech 2 Comments Tags: android, apple, AT&T, communication, development, google, iphone, mac, microsoft

Over the last few years, Apple has solidified itself as the cool kid’s legitimate alternative to the Microsoft mainstream. They have excelled at packaging hardware and software together in sexy ways with usability that has put all the first-movers on defense, scrambling to catch up. The iPhone has been a smash hit and helped them expand their Mac market share substantially. broken-iphone But when you’re at the top of the cool mountain, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep your footing. There are storm clouds on the horizon, and there’s a revolution brewing.

The torches are being lit over in iPhone land. The iPhone has been a cult success in spite of itself in many ways. Other phones had better hardware and more features, and the iPhone was missing long standard features like MMS. But nothing matched the allure of the all touch screen form factor and the brilliant iPhone OS. When the App store was released, that made up for many of the (still persistent) feature deficiencies. But now that App Store is becoming a real problem for users and developers alike.

No soup for you!

The biggest issue is that the App Store is the only way to get your software on an iPhone without hacking it. Apple is the gatekeeper, and decides what goes in and what doesn’t. They claim it’s to maintain quality standards, and phone stability, which is a noble goal. The problem is that there are some gray areas as well. For example, applications that contain profanity are regularly rejected (including dictionaries). Ok, maybe we can overlook that. Then there are apps that are rejected because they might use too much of AT&T’s bandwidth, like the sling player. Other phones on AT&T have the sling player, but fine, maybe we can overlook that too. Then there are apps that “replicate existing iPhone functionality”, like competing browsers such as Opera, or most recently, Google’s Voice app. Now it’s getting harder to overlook.

Our phones are less appliances, and more specialized and miniaturized PCs.

Many people, especially techies like me, don’t really see much distinction between our phones and our computers. Our phones are less appliances, and more specialized and miniaturized PCs. My iPhone basically has the same hardware as the Pentium III PC I took to college a decade ago, only it doesn’t weigh 20lbs. It runs a proper operating system (a stripped down version of OS X in fact), and has much of the same software and applications that I use on my desktop. For all intents and purposes, it is a PC in an ultra mobile form factor (PC here being the general term for a ‘personal computer’, not necessarily a Windows computer).

So imagine if Microsoft said “you can create any app you want for Windows, but it has to go through us first for Quality Assurance.” And then imagine that MS rejected Firefox because it duplicated the built in functionality of IE, or it rejected violent games due to ‘morality standards’, or it rejected applications because they might use too much of your ‘unlimited’ DSL bandwidth, or in some cases, arbitrarily rejected your app for vague and unexplained reasons? It’s hard to imagine that going over well, but that’s exactly what Apple is doing with the iPhone App Store.

A lot of developers have poured a ton of money into development for the iPhone, and a lot of cool apps have been released (I’m raving about the USAA banking app today). But the recent decisions by Apple must be giving developers serious pause.

Google Android (G1)

It’s one thing to invest a couple hundred thousand dollars into an app and then not have it sell well, it’s a whole other issues to invest that kind of money and not be able to sell it at all because Apple won’t allow it into the store.

Meanwhile, Google has built their own mobile OS, Android, on open source principals. Anyone can develop any app for it, no different from a desktop computer. Android runs on a variety of different devices, across multiple carriers, and compared to the iPhone is looking like a much more free environment.

Certainly AT&T is a big part of the problem – and is taking it’s fair share of heat as well. But Apple should be holding the cards here – their exclusivity contract is nearly up, and they don’t have to play by AT&T’s rules.

Solutions

Developers can then submit their apps for review to get into Tier 1, but know that they can always fall back to Tier 2 if there’s a problem.

I don’t like to be critical without a proposed solution, so here is what I would propose Apple do to calm the revolt. First, don’t renew the exclusivity contract with AT&T. If they’re influencing decisions here, give users the option to use a carrier who won’t. Second, create a tiered App Store. Tier 1 is what we have today – verified software by Apple, no adult content, low risk, with extra functionality like push notifications. Tier 2 is what is available on the black market of jailbroken iPhones today – lacking certification and quality assurance, but providing users and developers the freedom to connect as they should in the computing world, without a middleman. Enable parental controls so that parents can configure phones for their children that only access Tier 1, but we adults can assume the risks of Tier 2. Developers can then submit their apps for review to get into Tier 1, but know that they can always fall back to Tier 2 if there’s a problem.

Apple is exposing a soft underbelly here that you can bet Google and Microsoft will be aiming for. Google’s alliance with Apple is all but dissolved at this point, with Google going it alone with their own devices. Microsoft has some new things cooking with Windows Mobile 7 as well, and it’s getting harder to arbitrarily hate everything Microsoft. Apple needs to get it’s act together or they will find themselves as the anti-competitive villain they claimed to be fighting against.

Why IE6 isn’t dead yet, and how you can twist the knife.

Jul 18, 2009 By Brian Scates in Business, Design, Tech 14 Comments Tags: browser, development, ie6, ie7, microsoft, twitter, web design

The web is abuzz lately with mounting campaigns against IE6. Web designers and producers have been moaning about it for years, but the reality has been that 20%+ of internet users have still used the old browser, avoiding the upgrade to 7 for whatever reason. There’s a reason it’s stuck around so long, even now, 8 years later, and a twitter campaign is not going to kill it. I do have a suggestion for easing development pain, though, and ultimately ending the bane of IE6.

"IE6 Must Die"

Before we can kill IE6, we need to understand why it’s still alive. Your mother already upgraded, she’s not the problem anymore. The problem is IT managers at really big companies. For the sake of personification, we’ll call them ‘Chet.’ Many years ago when IE6 was released, Microsoft added a lot of proprietary features that turned the browser into a development platform. Netscape had been defeated, and IE had over 90% browsershare. A lot of IT departments took great advantage of this, building custom software for their companies, intranets, and so on. But then we had a bit of a revolution on the internet – a huge shift toward open source and standards based development practices that would work across all browsers. The rise of alternative browsers like Firefox and Safari has fueled this trend, forcing developers to take other browsers into consideration. Even Microsoft has joined the game, abandoning their proprietary code in favor of standards.

The remaining IE6 users are not voluntary IE6 users, but shackled IE6 users. Thanks, Chet.

Unfortunately, Chet has been a bit oblivious to this trend. Chet is old-school, and he expects the software that his team developed to last a long time. It’s expensive to rebuild these things, especially after they have years of additional code stacked on top of them. Chet wasn’t really forward looking, and didn’t expect the browser world to leave him behind. No problem though – as long as we mandate IE6 for all users in the company and never upgrade, nothing breaks. Nice thinking, Chet.

I have first hand experience with these companies, and there’s more of them than you think. And they’re really big ones, with tens of thousands of employees, all using outdated legacy software built on top of archaic software, virtualized and VPN’d. The remaining IE6 users are not voluntary IE6 users, but shackled IE6 users (as Digg recently discovered). Thanks, Chet.

So what can we do about it?

At Mural, we would love to drop support for IE6, but when your clients are companies where Chet works, you can’t build a site for them that nobody at their office can use. I was working on a proposal today in fact for a certain giant internet retailer, and of course we get to estimating production and have to start thinking about how much time we expect we’ll need for IE6 debugging. We had been toying with the idea of leaving IE6 out of our SOW, thinking that the main audience for this site probably would be on IE7 or greater. But instead of just leaving it out and having the inevitable conversation about it later when they insist they need it, we decided to take another approach: make it a line item.

Instead of a line item for all development/production, make another line item for ‘legacy IE6 compatibility.’… For clients, it forces them to consider exactly how much that 5-10% is worth.

The reason most clients insist they want their sites to cater to the remaining 5-10% of users using IE6 is that they don’t really know how much development time that adds to their project. So make it real for them. Instead of a line item for all development/production, make another line item for ‘legacy IE6 compatibility.’ If you’re anything like us, that line item probably adds 30% or more to the cost. For clients, it forces them to consider exactly how much that 5-10% is worth. More importantly, it creates awareness inside those companies that Chet is costing them money, and is going to continue to cost them money as long as his systems are dependent on IE6. It helps build an ROI case for updating their systems.

So complain all you want on blogs. Add an anti-IE icon to your twitter avatar. But if you really want to help make a difference in the campaign against IE6, it’s up to you (agencies, designers, developers) to make the case to your clients to move forward, and it’s up to you (clients and employees at large companies) to go tell Chet how much he’s costing you.

Update: TechCrunch points out a new campaign pointed at IT managers, Hey IT!