Having A Pretty Product Only Goes So Far
Design has clearly been an important role in startups the last few years as we’ve seen with AirBnB, Dropbox, Uber, Mixpanel, and many others. Being a designer myself I caught onto the doctrine of prettier and incrementally better are the only things you need to build a successful startup. I realize now how naive and toxic that thinking is. There’s a fundamental difference between things being designed well and things being pretty on the outside. There is nothing wrong with being pretty, it’s encouraged in fact, but true design extends further than the surface.
Good design should be the thread that stitches everything together. Good design doesn’t mean pixel perfection either, it means at the core of your product everything is thought out and ran like a well oiled machine that just works. Think of some of the products you hate the most, there’s probably a good reason why. Nine times out of ten it’s a UX issue, but really, pixel perfection =! a well thought out product no matter how much time you spend obsessing over colors, margin, and padding.
You can have the best auto painter in the world paint your car, but if you’re driving a 1978 AMC Pacer, it doesn’t matter much. However, if your problem is real and you’ve come up with a solution that is truly thought out and tested, it can then be in the ranks to the likes of a Ferrari that is truly worthy of the best painters craftsmanship. Ferrari didn’t obsess over the paint before they built the car. You shouldn’t worry about the space between letters in your logo before your product is truly an intuitive, easy to use solution to the problem you are supposed to be solving. Spend that time talking to customers, getting user feedback, and having an innovative product. Then and only then should you worry about making it shine.
All the companies I mentioned at the beginning have great design on the surface, but dig deeper than that. It’s not about the surface although that comes with having good design. AirBnB is valuable not because it is beautiful, but because it is an innovative solution to a very big problem. Being beautiful is a by product of being innovative and having design at the core. You can work you’re way out from the inside, but design can’t fix a fundamental problem from the outside in. Think about this next time you work with a designer to build v45 of your product. It’s time we forget the notion that being pretty is everything you need to be successful, being innovative to a real problem is one of the keys to success.
