startup

Designers vs. Developers in Startups – You Need Both!

By Brian Scates in Business, Design, Tech 4 Comments Tags: , , , ,

Designers vs. Developers in Startups – You Need Both!

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.

Don’t define your customers, let your customers define you.

By Brian Scates in Business, Design No Comments Tags: , , , ,

Never underestimate the creativity of your customers. You may think you have a great product, but don’t get married to your intended purpose for it. It’s quite possible that customers will find alternative uses you may not have even thought of, maybe even better uses. If you’re launching a new product, particularly a web app, be prepared to adapt it to the way your customers actually use it, and not necessarily the way you designed it.

Original sketch of what would become Twitter

Original sketch of what would become Twitter

The most recent, and high profile example of this is Twitter. Twitter was originally designed as a “what are you doing/thinking/status” feed for friends. 140 character limits forced you to keep it short and sweet, and post more often. At first, this is how people used it, but after a while we all grew bored reading about how so and so was heading to the mall, or feeling a bit down today, or enjoying the rain.

Looking at twitter today, I think celebrities are the only ones left posting the mundane details of their daily activities. The rest of us have re-purposed Twitter for other uses. We have conversations, we share the latest news with shortened URLs, we plug our latest blog posts and company announcements, and then we ‘retweet’ anything we think our followers would think is interesting. Twitter is being used as a gauge for measuring hot topics, and for insight into consumer opinion and behavior. Brands are engaging with customers, providing technical support, hawking their wares, and turning their customer service reps loose. Then there are those who use Twitter as an alternative to RSS. And on the dark side, some users are trying to establish a Twitter beachhead for their “make money from home” affiliate businesses.

The reason there isn’t a plan for monetizing Twitter is that the primary use of Twitter has not really been established yet – it’s in constant flux.

Twitter has done a good job at adapting to these new uses. They have adopted the @user nomenclature for mentions, added top 10 trending lists, and opened up an API for data mining, spawning a whole industry of satellite businesses built around the information in the Twitter network. A new Twitter app shows up about every 3 days. Twitter would be nowhere if they had insisted that their service just be used for stream of conscious updates from teenagers.

At Mural, we’re close to officially launching a new site called CloudProfile, with sister company SMBLive. We’ve designed it with a specific purpose in mind – connecting small businesses with customers on the web, and in particular with social networks. But we’re already thinking of alternative uses, just for ourselves. Instead of setting up a central company blog, for example, we’re planning to simply give every employee their own CloudProfile, and then setting up a page on our site that aggregates the collective wisdom of all of our employees. It means everyone is connected to their own networks, as well as the corporate network, and upkeep of the blog doesn’t fall to one person or become a laborious task.

I love the idea of building tools that can be used in a myriad of new ways, and can’t wait to see what the world does with CloudProfile. As you build your apps, make sure that you’re building tools that empower users, not restrict them. Don’t spend forever building the perfect feature-complete app, but get an initial version out early and watch what people do with it. It may be used in ways you didn’t expect, and you should be nimble enough to assign development resources to supporting those unexpected uses. Connect your users together so they can share how they use it and allow good ideas to spread. The more uses your app has, the more valuable it becomes to more customers, so embrace it!