product design philosophies: user-focused versus metrics
…Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product.
…everything about Tumblr is better designed. I used the landing page as one example, but there are tons of features where Tumblr shines by its gorgeous design.
Meanwhile Posterous is typical of the Silicon Valley engineering mindset where everything is measured, ranked, weighted. It’s like Google. And having terrible design like Google is great if you have a technology edge. But if you’re in a market where what matters is design edge, that’s not enough. There needs to be great design, by which I don’t mean looks (though they’re important), but how it works for the end user.
Meanwhile, Tumblr is typical of the new New York startups, that have great engineering talent, but care about design, UI and UX.
—Why Tumblr is kicking Posterous’s ass, by PEG on Tech, via Daring Fireball
I don’t necessarily agree with Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry that the divide between engineering and design is strictly SF/NYC, but I do agree that the there certainly are two different philosophies for product design that are as immediately apparent, looking at a website, as comparing the difference between Apple and Dell hardware.
Scribd (my last company) is a very engineering-based company, and I am a very user-focused designer. Both focuses are legitimate ways to build a product, but as you can imagine, working for a company or hiring employees whose product-building philosophies don’t match your own is usually frustrating. Compare this random Scribd doc page to my proposed redesigns and you’ll see what I mean.
Gobry’s closing remarks:
…for consumer web apps today, design matters more than technology. Much has been written about how the cloud, accessible web frameworks, etc. have dramatically lowered the cost of getting a startup to market, and that’s certainly true, but it also means that since everyone is on EC2 and Ruby on Rails, technology is no longer what differentiates most consumer web apps. What does is design. UI/UX design. Social design…To be sure, technology is and always will be very important. I don’t want to go back to the startup where the MBA bosses around engineers. And some of the best designers will be engineers (like David Karp, or Mark Zuckerberg). But you can’t just engineer anymore. You have to design.
This is absolutely true, but he doesn’t mention the major trump card of social media sharing sites: having the most content. I don’t know anyone that really loves YouTube or considers it a favorite site. It is, frankly, way too ugly to love. But it is tremendously popular, and has an extraordinarily high brand recognition, because it has the most good content. In terms of design, Vimeo blows YouTube out of the water, but because Vimeo has chosen to focus on higher-quality indie videos, YouTube is still the first place people think of when they want to watch kittens falling asleep in hilarious ways.
—Timoni
