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Comment by fookyong | Hacker News Reader

This "infographic" (it's a gallery!) got me so riled up that I felt compelled to blog for the first time in months!

Focus on value creation. Design enhances value, it does not create it. Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing. A product or service that is indispensably useful yet looks like ass is infinitely more likely to be successful than a product that solves zero problems but looks like a work of art. Stop this cycle of creating beautiful novelties, getting your 15 minutes, then disappearing. Create value.

More below - sorry to self promote but it's relevant :)

http://yongfook.com/post/14295124427/design-is-horseshit

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Went to go play soccer with engineers, designers and business folks as a team and come back to this...alas I guess you put out positive energy into the universe and it's natural to get negative too...why would you even say 'design is horseshit,' that's totally unproductive, polarizes people, and disrespects a LOT of people... who would post something saying 'engineering is horseshit'? Just doesn't make sense, and I'm an engineer too...why not collaborate and work together? Our disciplines and skills regardless of general titles are just means to hopefully create meaningful impact, drop the ego...of course I agree with you that a product/service that's useful is better than something that just looks like art, duh, so stop firing up an age-old tired conflict, I think we've evolved past bickering and being bullies by now...instead of welcoming peers who can create value with you... you're comments are what keep designers out of working with startups...

Also, we specifically use the word co-founder in the title and say: "Nearly every designer founder has a technical co-founder and some have technical backgrounds which furthers the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration" and we're encouraging more hyper productive designer-hacker dyads...I think the reality is that most of brilliant people here in Silicon Valley are scared to get out of their comfort zone and work on really hard unglamorous problems, especially those of the other %99, because the feedback loops we've created promote the beautiful novelties and vanity consumerism versus sustainable businesses with positive social impact, so again I agree with you...

"Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works." Did you read previous comment citing Jesse Schell? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3359218 and specific skills we modern designers in tech need http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3358880

Have you read the software design manifesto by Mitch Kapor http://hci.stanford.edu/publications/bds/1-kapor.html

Highly recommend exploring design ethnography and user research methods that focus on value discovery and value creation eg that's why places like IDEO thrive...

Also do you know we're related through Cookpad? I'm disappointed and surprised by our statements which seem at odds with your company values...

I'm guessing the purpose of the title "Design is horseshit" is to attract attention. It's not much different than saying "co-founders with a background in design create billions worth of value".

If you actually read the article the author basically says "Design enhances value, it does not create it." and there's nothing to argue about that - it's a fact. Another fact is that "programming enhances value, it does not create it".

In other words, the tools you use to create value are secondary to the actual value created. Talking about our tools we use is something we like to do. Too much talk about our tools, and too little thought on the end result, sometimes leads us to think that our tools are most important than the end result

Because you didn't just "put positive energy into the universe". You hyped something in a way that was divisive.

We've been repeatedly explicit about NOT being divisive... you see Larry or Mark or other folks getting celebrated and you don't see the design community getting mad...how many design students even know about Mitch or Chad let alone the general public... Per previous comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3358720 we posed a question and again are promoting collaboration and co-creation...

Saying "we are not being divisive" isn't enough to make you not divisive, unfortunately. It's in the nature of your message, and how people take it.

"Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing. A product or service that is indispensably useful yet looks like ass is infinitely more likely to be successful than a product that solves zero problems but looks like a work of art."

Why do you assume that focusing on design in a startup means that the startup will "solve zero problems"? Admittedly, I'm biased (my startup is in the current batch of The Designer Fund), but the fund is very focused not on "prettiness", but usability and interfaces that work and convert.

I think it's rather unfair that you look at the graphic which is celebrating companies with designers and then rant about design making shitty products. Design is CRUCIAL to a good product, because design isn't "prettiness", it's how people use it and how it works.

Which of those infographic cards would you call shitty? And why?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most of those companies are solving relatively small problems compared to Google, Paypal or EBay. They're all video sharing, blogging or design specific sites, and the ones which are successful or important are not successful because of their design (eg. Youtube), or have designs which are painful to use (eg. Slideshare).

By all means celebrate companies with designers, but saying "designers created $billions of value" is a bit of a stretch when there are so many counter-examples.

Yes I agree with your first sentence, that's the point we need more to designers to step up to the challenge...We didn't say what you quoted, we specifically say in order "billions worth of value created by tech startups with designer co-founders" and also say, "Nearly every designer founder has a technical co-founder and some have technical backgrounds which furthers the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration"... also see previous comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3359176 hopefully this is also a challenge to the next generation of designers to step up and ship something of consequence in collaboration with other brilliant folks from different background like great engineers who have been doing it for decades in deep tech... design+tech entrepreneurship is still in it's infancy... I do know that we need to be proactively driving new ideas and not be so reactive. “They have checkins, and group coupons, and native apps, and just got a valuation of thirty billion; WE need to have checkins! We need group coupons! Bring on the native apps!” I hope future designer-entrepreneurs can be more proactive and present a state that doesn’t yet exist. Addressing latent needs ESPECIALLY in emerging markets and coming up re-framed business models for the other 99% of the population.

Yes, I read your caveat, but the overall gist of your article is still that designers create billions of dollars of value. I just don't think there's enough evidence to warrant that implication - particularly when there are other startups which have butt-ugly, hard-to-use websites and make even more money.

I used the word "with" and didn't say they created it by themselves, obviously it takes a lot of people... Part of the gist is encouraging designers to believe they can and therefore try, hopefully in collaboration, especially since talent is getting stretched in our bubble here

I don't think you've addressed his criticism. A usable interface that works and converts still may solve no actual problem.

His concern isn't unreasonable. Look at the output of a lot of design schools and design agencies. The primary skills seem to be making things that look beautiful and appealing, without a whole lot of concern about end-user value.

That's unsurprising when you consider how many design-school people end up in advertising and marketing, the purpose of which is to manipulate consumer behavior without regard to actual value delivered. Indeed, a concern for end-user value is a positive handicap in that environment; I have friends who have had to eventually change careers because they started to think too much about the impact of what they did.

Wrote a brief response here: http://enriqueallen.tumblr.com/post/14480645124/design-both-... Here's a couple excerpts: “Focus on value creation. Design enhances value, it does not create it.” This statement represents the core contradiction and flaw in his argument which barely makes this discussion worth having. Let’s look at the word “creation” which is a fascinating word generally associated with “the action or process of bringing something into existence.” So if you re-write the sentence with this definition, it becomes, “focus on the action or process of bringing value into existence.” But what comes before an action or process whether conscious or subconscious in your DNA? Design. Borrowing from a Google definition, design means, “purpose, planning, or intention that exists or is thought to exist behind an action, fact, or material object.” Therefore to create value one must design how to do it, thus making the rest his post null.

If you agree with the flawed logic of Jon then you must substitute the word “Design” with any discipline concerning the action or behavior of creating value. Thus making a series of useless posts like “Engineering is Horseshit” and so on. You don’t see the design community getting mad at engineers who spend weeks designing an optimal database sharding strategy for building things like a daily-deal aggregator which has 0 users and a growth rate of “Divide by Zero Error” and no viable user acquisition strategy. Of course entrepreneurs should focus on value creation and finding product market fit before spending an inappropriate amount of energy on other activities whether that be visual design or backend infrastructure. Any entrepreneur I invest in should know that elementary lesson from experience or reading the Lean Startup etc.

There are significant and notable cases where design is the major or one of the handful of value-driving engines of product (apple was a startup, people found value in design, jawbone, airbnb as a better experience in relation to VRBO, etc). It looks like your seemingly deriding view is of web app startups. To put this into perspective: we spend nearly 105K a year on Salesforce licenses on behalf of our company and clients. I personally think Salesforce is a particularly SHITTY, low value product because of the design. If competition gives me SF with a great UI, I find value I'm that and will pay handsomely. Value can be created by design explicitly.

I think there is a line in Founders at work that goes "Appearance starts where performance ends".

If you think that design == appearance, you must not spend time on the internet.

Man, how is being a apparatus working for you and the people around you?

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