Comments on: Why You’re Going to Hire the Wrong Designer

By: Cynthia Kocialski

Cynthia Kocialski — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 20:26:00 +0000

Whenever you hire someone outside of your area of expertise, it’s a matter of luck if you get it right the first time. My background is product development, and when I first had a sales organization under me as COO, the CEO (who had a sales background) told me that I would know the good sales people immediately because they would be the people I instantly disliked. I appreciate their talent but they are not likely to be my close personal friends. Many start-ups are founded by technical experts, who then have to hire other job functions such as marketing, sales, PR and so on that they barely understand. Honestly, just ask a software programmer what the difference between sales and marketing is. A founder recently told me that he had to engage and disengage with 3 PR firms before he found the right one.

By: Jeremy Anderson

Jeremy Anderson — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 04:40:00 +0000

The sentiment in your article is pretty on target, but all this talk about separate UX people and separate designers is, well, not helpful. If you design for the web, user experience is part of the job. Calling yourself an expert in user experience is like calling yourself an expert in breathing.

User experience is the take-away from of all the other pieces that make up the whole. User centered design principles play a part in creating great user experience and should be a part of the design process. Distinguishing “designer” from UX or IA or IXD is just a painful misunderstanding of what a designer does.

Further more, successful “ugly” sites, aren’t successful because they are ugly. More often than not, they are success despite the fact they are are ugly, simply because the majority of users don’t know they can expect more.

By: Gercek Karakus

Gercek Karakus — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 04:09:00 +0000

The best UX experts are generally designers with engineering background. They can create unbelievably beautiful UI and convert it into HTML5/CSS3/jQuery in a short period of time(relatively speaking). This process starts by Information Architecture, continues with graphical design and goes all the way down to building user interactions.

By: Gercek Karakus

Gercek Karakus — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 04:05:00 +0000

Best UX experts are usually designers with engineering background. They can create unbelievably beautiful UI and convert it into HTML5/CSS3/jQuery. This whole process starts with Information Architecture and goes all the way down to user interaction.

By: Seth - Subimage LLC

Seth - Subimage LLC — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 03:43:00 +0000

As other commenters have mentioned, this is really the job of two people – a UX designer, and a graphic designer. Sometimes those two skill sets merge in one person, but that’s the exception not the rule.

Anyhow, great post. Good to see others are catching onto this concept. The web will be better for it.

By: Roy Leban

Roy Leban — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 09:06:00 +0000

Great points. I’ll go a step further and say: Don’t hire a “designer” at all. Hire a UX expert and an artist. And I mean someone who understands UX, not someone who draws UI.

By: Booty the Unicorn

Booty the Unicorn — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 21:24:00 +0000

So the question for me is: How do you hire a designer that can deliver from more of the hexes? What are the right questions? Where do you even start to find someone?

By: Jim McNeely

Jim McNeely — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 11:57:00 +0000

This is fantastic stuff. It is critical to pinpoint requirements, such as types of users, performance goals, etc. and let design follow. You design for all the users and stakeholders, and some of these needs are not always so obvious. It is very difficult to jump into design work when at least a large chunk of the requirements and desires have not been clarified.

Then, I have become fond of thinking about experience design instead of just thinking about design. I am pretty dogged about doing wireframe designs that are completely devoid of visual appeal, so that end users can respond to the experience without being influenced by the pretty buttons. This also, ironically, gives a visual designer more space to think about the visual apsect of the design more freely.

I am going to lift your hexagon diagram and use it going forward; thanks for a fantastic post.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 22:05:00 +0000

Great post Tony. The industry has certainly evolved a lot over the past 10 years and at least design is now seen as an important component of success. But, you are absolutely correct that most people cannot recognize “good design”; meaning design that finds a way to meet the users’ needs while meeting the product and business goals. When people say “good design” they usually mean “pretty design”. And I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count the number of pretty designs that I have seen over the years which fundamentally fail at meeting the needs of the user and the business. There are so many examples of “ugly design” which has simply worked (e.g., Craigslist). I don’t think we need to be that functionally extreme, but we would better served if designers focused more on elegance than beauty and performance instead of coolness.

By: Zdean

Zdean — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 05:10:00 +0000

A lot of what you’re describing here is probably a remnant of the old print design world where design value judgements (and hiring decisions) were/are far more subjective. Magazines, newspapers, etc. were/are not iterative b/c of slow content cycles and, probably more importantly, the expense involved in making & testing changes. The result is that you just can’t develop meaningful data point to test the effectiveness of the design and end up relying on the instinct of your art director/editor/etc.

The first major wave of web designers were migrants from the print community. Now, as a new generation of designers has come into its own from within the web/interactive community, I think you’ll start seeing individuals who are more comfortable applying metrics to their design iterations.