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To make a counter-argument: I previously worked at a larger e-commerce company with a very strong design department. Working with the design team was not always easy because they had their own ideas about what customers wanted/prefer. They also had their own ideas about what is morally acceptable to implement and what is not. Within the company, they almost had their own culture. As a result, we had no "dark patterns," which was a good thing.

In some cases, however, it became clear that their design/aesthetics thinking was more important to them than user experience. For example, when we displayed prices on mobile devices, we did not include a CTA. My team persuaded them to conduct a simple A/B test on mobile with an arrow button next to prices. As a result, conversion increased by 10%. People simply did not realize they could continue to the next step by clicking on the price. The design team despised the button, but it enabled customers to complete their tasks on our website.

My personal opinion is that this is the result of "low quality" of design education.

When you separate intellectual and practical processes you cannot crate meaning. Example of top of my head: Bauhaus revolution was possible because of practical approach towards design.

Designers that prefer aesthetic over product function are actually not professionals. Designers that have no insight in technical implementation are not capable to design properly. To design properly, one must rely on deep knowledge of classical principles and actual data.

P.S. This counter-argument sounds more like "management and communication" problem.

Yes, maybe you’re right. But in this case at least the problem was clearly “located” in the design departement.

I think this highlights that graphic designers are not necessarily good UI designers.

Yes and no. The foundations of design are aesthetics and critical thinking. Every design has technical and functional specification.

If one designs a car, one must know what is "packaging". If one designs for print, one must know the printing process. If one designs for UI, one must know the medium inside out. There is no generalisation. I can argue that todays UI designers have lack of design foundation, color theory, composition, typography and are producing colourful, non-functional garbage.

Example: The lack of contrast in mass adopted UI trends is not only aesthetically wrong but actually is an accessibility problem.

Example: This is a company with 13 million funding, without budget to spend on design:

While the team is still less than ~20 ppl, we likely won't have a full-time designer. With the ubiquity of tools like Figma and design libraries like Material Design, we actually think this is okay. You're welcome to hire an agency to help with things like colors, fonts, illustrations, and to audit our component library.

Agency? To help? May be more like "some freelancers and stock design templates". Good Lord. And then you have audacity to complain that "there is no design".

I'm not quite sure what position and tone the parent comment is aiming for. Is this an example of the GP's concern that you are agreeing with? Or an example of why you think graphic design really is overrated because here's a company with millions in funding that doesn't care about design?

You're welcome to hire an agency to help with things like colors, fonts, illustrations, and to audit our component library.

I suspect someone like the GP could help with the other 90% of what graphic design is about, too, and the attitude implied here (whether it's your or the company's, again I'm not sure) is probably exactly what the GP is disappointed with.

I represent my company and my professional views. You don't have to agree with me. If I have 13 million investment for new product I will invest in design system and brand differentiation from the start - period. Why? Because of the idea that my product must be unique. But hey, there is material library, why bother at this stage? Just hire someone to "decorate" over and make some "trendy" illustrations. Right?

Just an inside: Last year I have returned 5 offers to redesign "some product" from startups, because they have build it with this way of thinking and redesign implementation is not possible. They must rebuild the whole product from scratch with design focus.

Don't fall in this trap, to think that I have something "personal" and you must imply some wrongdoing. Please.

Hit the nail on this one.

I didn't see the response to your comment as implying wrongdoing.

I was also having difficulty understanding the point you were making.

You've clarified that now though, so thank you.

I wasn't intending to imply any wrongdoing, and I too was having some trouble understanding which side of the argument the comment I replied to was taking. (The comment was also edited after I wrote my reply.)

After the follow-up, I think nbzso is arguing that good design does matter and can't just be retrofitted later, and in that case, we agree.

Edit: Also, I've just realised that both the top comment and the one I replied to were written by the same person, so actually it seems very clear that we're in agreement. Apologies for missing that before.

Thanks for your reply.

> judging by the designers salaries - frontend devs are more valuable than skilled design professional. So, this is what you get by paying less.

Why should frontend devs be not paid more than designers? Many frontend devs have dedicated significant numbers of years to become skilled professionals, just like you.

As a front-end dev by nature of my business I witnessed the difference my self and can share it with you. When designing a product right and towards long term quality, designers decision has more business value than front-end development.

You can use design system for years to come and change front-end tech several times in this period. Todays front-end development is not like in 2008 when we used vanilla JS/Jquery/Ajax, there are tons of libraries and modularity in front-end development process. The low payment for designers is just tech founders devaluing the design process and the result is less qualified designers competing for what is left on the table (spoiler alert: it’s not too much).

As you can see from citation, the mentioned startup is not looking for a designer, because they are under 20 people. Design is not important, because in perceived from tech founders view - material design library will be enough:)

Don’t get me wrong. There are use cases for front-end development, when experienced developer can be critical for the business and bring immense value. I share my point of view, that if things go in current direction may be in near future design will be generated by neural nets on some “data proven” and “success guaranteed” methodology.

> When designing a product right and towards long term quality, designers decision has more business value than front-end development.

A good design badly implemented leads to a poor product.

> You can use design system for years to come and change front-end tech several times in this period.

> Todays front-end development is not like in 2008 when we used vanilla JS/Jquery/Ajax, there are tons of libraries and modularity in front-end development process.

> The low payment for designers is just tech founders devaluing the design process and the result is less qualified designers competing for what is left on the table (spoiler alert: it’s not too much).

Or it could be a realization by founders that design skills have commoditized enough that specialist designers do not provide enough incremental value.

If you hold the position that other parts of product development have commoditized with the advent of more libraries, it a strange to claim that design is immune to this change over time. The stance is especially peculiar because you also claim that the value of good design is its ability to be applicable for many years.

So, maybe in many domains all the good designs have been explored and consensus arrived at that paying high for a specialist designer is valuable to only handful of teams?

Or it could be a realization by founders that design skills have commoditized enough that specialist designers do not provide enough incremental value.

It could be, yes. Another possibility is that most founders have so little knowledge of good design and what it can do that most of them don't even consider whether it can be used to their advantage. I suspect there is some truth in both of these theories.

Some examples that come to mind immediately are Apple, Tesla and Ubiquiti, all of which have been successful despite entering established markets where huge incumbents had vast resources available to compete. That success came after the newcomers introduced more "designer" hardware products that offered slick user experiences, making the competition look old and clunky by comparison, and giving the newcomers enough of an edge to disrupt the market. Something else that is noticeable about all of those companies is that they have built extremely loyal customer bases, which have endured even when they've had problems with products and despite their relatively high prices.

It seems to be accepted wisdom among much of the startup community that a business like Apple is unique and there is no point trying to follow the same strategy because we can't all be Steve Jobs or Jony Ive. Maybe a few more founders should be asking, why not?

Unfortunately, quality is expensive. Customers don't always want to pay for it, and so the businesses serving those customers don't either. This is true of good design, but other things too. For example, how many software businesses today believe having lots of bugs is OK as long as they can keep the money coming in?

Some of the most successful sites on the Web have abysmal design and some of the most successful sites on the Web break all the time. And yet, despite those things, they remain among the most successful sites on the Web. Unless and until those of us who value quality can make it pay as a business model, we're always going to lose the argument. The hard thing to accept is that if we can't turn better quality into a competitive advantage, maybe we should be losing the argument.

I am happy that we have a discussion on the subject. Its rare nowadays. We all share bits of personal and professional true, which is what makes HN a priceless place.

"Another possibility is that most founders have so little knowledge of good design and what it can do that most of them don't even consider whether it can be used to their advantage. I suspect there is some truth in both of these theories."

Commoditisation of design elements is a chance for startups to hire qualified designer from the start. In hands of a good designer, commoditisation is a prototype tool, not final point of implementation.

The problem is that they are not willing to pay for "design", because they undervalue the work of designers and don't understand how critical is for their products in competitive market in which everyone uses the same UI libraries, the same "best practices", the same PM mantras.

I think perhaps the question we are avoiding here is exactly when it makes sense for a tech firm to bring in specialist design skills. It's easy to say "from the start", but in reality, if you've got maybe 1-3 founders starting a new tech business from scratch, it would be unusual for any of them to be a specialist designer. Maybe one of them has some decent design skills in addition to whatever their main role is, but that's probably the best you're going to get.

The first hires will almost certainly need to be developers or salespeople. If you're looking for early funding, you need something to show potential investors and you need to know if you've found product-market fit. If it's a bootstrapped firm that isn't looking for outside investment, you need to bring money into the bank and establish a sustainable cash flow, and no amount of design will do that if you don't have something you can sell and someone to sell it.

So realistically, you're probably looking at bringing in specialist designers no earlier than the "second wave" of employees. At that point, you probably already have some sort of MVP and maybe a few further iterations. If a designer can't come in at that stage and effectively guide the existing product towards better usability and aesthetics, I think they're going to find opportunities for work are very sparse.

Then the question becomes, do all the commoditised toolkits and marketplace themes and colour scheme generators and icon packs do enough to make an early product useful before a "real" designer is involved? And I think obviously the answer is yes, because a lot of businesses have been doing that in recent years and it's worked for them. They're not ideal, but at that stage, they're good enough.

And so finally, I think the fundamental issue is about how a team building a new product without a dedicated designer can use those off-the-shelf tools and make something with good enough usability to be useful and attract business, while recognising that this is ideally a temporary situation and keeping everything as flexible as possible for the next stage of design when it starts to become more important and maybe they're starting to have team members with those specialist skills coming in to take responsibility for that aspect of the product. This is a subject that I see very little discussion about, compared to all the talk about one ready-made tool or another, or how an established design team might respond to different requirements later on.