Web designers. United.
This post is the first of a series about how we develop StyleJam following the predicaments of the Lean Startup movement.
The last months have been crazy and exciting, we spent countless hours hunting for bugs and implementing the features we thought were necessary to test the most important assumptions of this startup. We are finally ready to release our MVP to our patient users.
The first time I heard about the role of the Chief Designer Officer was when reading for the first time one of my favourite books: "Sketching User Experiences", from Bill Buxton.
Is design leadership an executive level position?
Do you have a Chief Design Officer reporting to the president?
These are very good questions to ask to a CEO, and I agree with Mr Buxton's conclusions:
If the answer to the last two questions is no, (...) the likely message you are telegraphing to your employees is that you are not serious about design and innovation.
Working for a startup is not easy, even though most designers I talk with are convinced that it's just designing yet another website for yet another company.
After working for 3 startups and being in the process of bootstrapping my first one, I can say that this kind of work is very different from working for an agency or being a freelancer, especially because you're not dealing with client work and a customer, but with a product and, hopefully, lots of users.
These are the 5 basic skills I think are absolutely necessary for a web designer to operate in a startup. It doesn't matter if you have them when you accept startup work, but that you're ready to develop them very fast.
I will also try to suggest some books you might want to read to improve your skills, books I've actually read, enjoyed and used in my day to day work.
As most of you probably already know, the term "startup" commonly means a high tech company with a limited history, commonly based on a particular product or idea than on a service.
To clarify, Dribbble and Lendle are startups funded respectively by web design rockstars Dan Cederholm and Jeff Croft. To make things short Dribbble is some kind of Twitter for web designers and Lendle is a social network for Kindle owners that lets you loan out your books and loan books from others.
In this article I would like to illustrate how designers can help startups, why they should and how they can do it. I would also like to illustrate how startups can use designers, as it appears that a lot of startups are putting design in a secondary role, thinking that A/B testing and similar programmatic ways of handling content can solve all their problems.
At this point most of you have probably heard in the news that 99designs, one of the most criticized startups in the field of design, raised 35M in their first round of investment.
I don't have anything in particular against 99designs or crowdsourcing in general, and I don't share the idea that they are "destroying the market" or similar claims, I actually believe that the market was already in a very bad shape and didn't need any help for getting worse.
Everything that is happening is a normal effect of the commoditization of design.
I've got to admit that at one point I felt a bit guilty because I called Dribbble a "show and tell thing". I will try to explain better my point of view in this article, suffice to say is that I love Dribbble and I don't see anything negative in being a "show and tell thing".
“Ideas are like poop. Not a thing to get excited about, but the end product of a repeatable process. And everybody can do it.” Amy Hoy
A couple of weeks ago I was reading a great essay from Andy Budd about selling design. Everything he says is, sadly, very true. A lot of people is promising "magic and drama", throwing "ideas" around like if design is some kind of black magic that "happens" in a designer's brain.
This is a big part of the problem, and really the most surprising: our product is just the side dish, customer's ego is much more important.
The fact is that customers are not able to correctly evaluate a design, plain simple. To understand what's going on, they need to talk about something else, "ideas", "feelings", "character", and never content, conversions and outcomes.
Many entrepreneurs realized how important execution is, but apparently design still belongs to the "making things pretty" area, forgetting that our job is centered around communication (or as someone likes to say,"conversions").
Common knowledge says that 4 over 5 startups fail, and this is not a magic recipe to improve your chances of succeeding, only a way to keep that single chance alive.
It's surprising to see how many entrepreneurs try to outsource design lately even though design is the single most important thing to get right, as an impressing number of startups have already proven. Surprising because, if I can be totally honest, it's incredibly naïve and I dare say stupid.
Neuro Web Design from Susan M. Weinschenk is an interesting book with a slightly misleading title, that can be an enjoyable and useful read for most web designers that want to sharpen their knowledge on human behaviour.
The author explains the inner working of our brain in a truly remarkable way, dividing the brain in three main parts: the new brain (logic and analysis), the mid brain (emotions) and the old brain (survival and instinct). She goes on explaining how those parts are interwined together and influence each other.
Unfortunately, I'm a hacker who is in love with design. As every respectable hacker, I tend to go deeper than the average in things I love, and sometimes I also feel the need to correct people when I believe they are not getting things straight.
Some days ago my attention was grabbed by a post on Hacker News where an entrepreneur was asked some crazy amount of money for the design of "a pretty standard web app".
I can definitely understand the frustration of the guy, and I don't want to comment on the price asked, but let's put things in order.
