Find someone with familiarity in building good UIs, designing a consistent brand for your product, and making absolutely sure that your product's message comes through clear as day.
I'm inferring from your comment that one can't have basic knowledge of decent UI without being a designer. Surely a coder can have a good idea about how to lay out a decent interface without having the skills to actually do so? It's this missing skill that a theme gives them.
My experience says mostly no. They're different skillsets. Occasionally they overlap in an individual.
In the end when you do hire a designer, you will have to rewrite a lot of your code to fix these issues.
Designers are best at finding attractive looks. User Interface design (aka, usability) was a computer science specialty long long before it was a thing people with degrees that have anything to do with photoshop or color have been doing it.
I constantly see designers put out things that are non-standard and unintuitive (I work in the iPhone world). I don't want to hear any "no-true scotsman" about that how they're bad designers, they're not. "Design" people generally come from information display background, not interactivity design background. Interactivity was a discipline that came from ergo and HCI researchers, not design schools.
But usability is different than information display. They throw expensive, non-functional items out there all the time, as well as ridiculous control schemes that work like crap.
For this reason alone, ignoring designers, and at best working with a usability expert, could be productive, but worrying about people who specialize in visual appeal and just try to stick onto interaction design because it sounds good on a resume is a bit rich.
UX as a field sucks because too many people who were taught to make pretty things are putting on airs as if they have an education on making things that work well. Actual usability people (with training and all that) are gems usually. If you don't know how to do a usability study, with controls and all that, you're probably missing a few things to prove yourself as a user interaction designer.
And if you hire a UX expert, undoubtedly you'll gain even more insight into usability. So what?
In the end when you do hire a designer, you will have to rewrite a lot of your code to fix these issues.
Why? I thought separation of logic and design was a near universal practise by now?
I know this comes off as an arrogant comment but I am drawing the logic straight from your arguments here.
A developer cannot design so the best option they have is to use templates of design created with no clear audience, and goal other than probably looking good (which is not in the least way what design is about).
Similarly, then if I am a designer then I should just use free scripts that let me make a social networking clone or delicious clone for my next project, right?
As a designer, you might find scripts / examples / tutorials that work, but without understanding the entire web stack it's going to be difficult to even get an "MVP" running. If I asked some designer friends to go set up a server to run Django, they probably wouldn't know where to start (though some would hunker down and truly figure it out, they would be the exception).
My opinion is that "decent design" is easier to achieve than "decent functionality". Don't get me wrong, I'm all for professional design and appreciate every minute that goes into it - every single app I've built over the past few years was started by an awesome designer (even my no-revenue side projects).
For the developer, though, things like http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap are helping us get very far into an app without asking designers for favors (or paying someone).
Again I cannot imagine doing this without a developer. At the same time things like Product Design and User Experience (note I am not even touching User Interface- which is what ou get with templates) require a certain level of detail that are perhaps better served by a designer who does this day in day out.
It appears that the general consensus is that just getting it out there is good enough reason to call it an MVP. I think this post from 37Signals nails it down as to what happens to user experience in an MVP http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2963-what-happens-to-user-exp...
If that if the developer doesn't know what he's developing or for whom, they're in trouble ;)
But if a designer knows nothing about code, knowing where to start and how to put the pieces together would be daunting. Coding has a very steep learning curve, whereas even amateurs can start designing right away.
Say you need a tool to reorder categories. You know the best way to do this would be with drag and drop, but the theme only has table views! So you place an "order" field in a table view and hope for the best.
Then you realize that having a line chart for displaying open cases in a bug tracker is stupid, but it's the only view you have so you stick with it.
All these little compromises form an incredibly expensive form of technical debt, and pretty soon you have a product that users wouldn't touch with a stick. It's better to have an ugly product that works well than a pretty product that's a pain to use.
My experience has been that a bootstrapping startup cannot afford to keep a designer on staff, and as a developer I'd much rather work with template components that are designed to be reused and moved around than a fixed design delivered by a contract designer that's not as flexible.
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very good point, I've been bitten by this one before
We would have completely missed our market if we had just jumped into coding before going after design. In that sense, I think if you don't have the designer chops, hiring a designer to get the good looking wireframes/mockups/etc to start doing customer validation is crucial - probably even more so than the code.
Thus far we've funded ourselves out of client projects and a small grant we received about a year and a half ago.
If you're doing a game, or something graphics-rich, that would be a different story.
This is the fundamental reason why companies like Apple are so successful.
I agree.
This is the fundamental reason why companies like Apple are so successful.
I don't think citing the most extreme example helps your previous argument. It'd be better if you could say company x is successful because of design and yet company x's main specialty isn't design.
I know an entrepreneur who spent about $5,000 on professional branding for a bootstrapped enterprise product. And the design did look very professional and creditable.
Two things went wrong:
1) He needed to build new landing pages, etc., on a regular basis, and these rarely looked as professional as the basic branding. So despite spending a lot of money, his site didn't look ultra-professional—at best, it looked competent. And that's not good enough to justify $5,000 in a bootstrapped startup.
2) He spent the $5,000 before proving that he could actually close sales.
In this case, I'd say that the $5,000 was spent prematurely. He could have purchased a lower-cost logo and spent a day browsing themeforest, and he would have wound up with something 80% as good for under $500. And that would have been enough to start e-mailing his industry contacts and trying to get his first sale. Getting that first sale was his biggest priority, because it would prove he had a real business.
So before deciding whether to hire a designer, ask yourself: Is looking professional the best use of your money right now? And what happens if you need to change your sales pitch significantly, or even pivot? Does your designer understand UX, advertising, copywriting, or do they just make logos and stationary? Can you afford to keep paying them? How bad are your own design skills?
Take Paras' visual website optimizer[1] as an example. Originally built using simpla admin[2], you can still see a screenshot on his blog, it worked well, he's now paid for a designer.
Perfectly good when he started out. Craig's list has also been mentioned. There's a DNS service who's name escapes me that's had a god awful design for ages but people rave about their customer service.
Design is a differentiator, not a must have. Would Google have won if they'd have got a designer in?
The massive caveat is that you need to buy a template that is well written. If you don't you're in for a lot of cleaning up work. That means that you must at least be competent with html to inspect the source or be lucky.
To be honest Simpla Admin rocks and that intersection of the right look and quality underlying html/css does take some hunting.
Even a brief glance is not enough, one of the themes I bought I ended up spending a few hours rewriting bits of it because the performance sucked due to overuse of cufon and jQuery. I wish I'd spent another 15 minutes checking out the code as I ended up chopping up quite a bit of it.
[1] http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ [2] http://themeforest.net/item/simpla-admin-flexible-user-frien...
It appears that I may not have been as clear as I could have been: I'm not arguing against hiring designers.
Nor am I arguing against thinking about design, UI or how your app will look and work.
I do hold the view, though, that hiring a designer when you're bootstrapping is a premature optimization.
Take advantage of that.
Startups are all about learning and iterating quickly. Your contract designer won't help you with that. When you need them to pump out the next iteration, they'll be working on another project and available in two weeks. No, you need those skills in-house.
If you can't persuade a designer to join your team (and man, this is hard when you're bootstrapping), the best course of action is to learn some these skills yourself. Even if it's slow, and even if it's hard.
Of course, this is exactly the same argument we've all made and read a million times before, except with s/developer/designer.
That 'ugh' feeling some of you are feeling at the prospect of learning to design? Yeah, that's the same way the guy spinning his wheels looking for a technical co-founder feels, when you tell him to learn to code. Still got to be done.
Steve Jobs: “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. [...] It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
Even more generally speaking, good visual design can be a powerful advantage but it's by no means necessary, especially on the web. See Bingo Card Creator, Visual Website Optimizer, Dropbox, Google, Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist, etc.
You don't need to have a degree from art school to be a designer, just like you dont need a CS degree to write code. You can learn the basic tenants of typography, grid systems, and usability on your own. Whether or not you hire a "designer," design thinking should be part of the process of product development from day one.
It would be nice if you could always say ... x + y = z, but that isn't the way the world works ... having a nice design out the gate can get you far enough to be worth that extra $5k that you invest in it. It just depends.
I guess the rule of thumb would be: pay the designer out of profits - no profits, no designer [1]
[1] and just to pre-empt the counter-arguments: a good product will survive a mediocre design; a great design won't save a bad product.
I would counter that a simple concept executed with design thinking informing the development is both practical and far more likely to succeed than yet another random solo developer's SaaS.
The problem is that there's two issues at play: the visual theme elements and the user experience. Sure, go ahead and buy a $14 theme if that gets you the head start you need to start working on solving a real problem for someone.
Except that's where the hard work begins. It's not your ability to style INPUT elements that is being tested, but your product vision and how people move through a workflow that is easy to understand.
In the early days of a SaaS, design and copy are probably 75% of the hard work in a MVP. Find me a successful startup that wishes they'd spend less energy on design thinking and just written more code and I'll revisit my perspective.
Otherwise I'll make the statement that any idea which doesn't deserve the attention of a design thinker is not likely to get off the ground because it's statistically not solving a hair-on-fire problem anyhow. Put differently: there's projects and there's start-ups. Start-ups are hard. If you're going to start-up, your future users appreciate you thinking about how your product makes them feel.
