2012: Year of the designer

Published by Simon de la Rouviere on Jan 20th, 2012, 1 Comment

As the mayor of New York (Michael Bloomberg) vowed to start coding along with 352 000+ other people, there is another trend brewing.

That trend is the decline of the need for technical proficiency due to increasingly cheap and powerful infrastructure. I am not saying that you will still need computer scientists solving difficult algorithmic problems. Millions of records in a database and the difficulty of scaling is still an issue. Serving fast pages and responsive designs is a big part of a great user experience and you can’t do that without having a technical person on your team.

The thing is, at some point, serving a website with bad quadratic algorithms will be equally fast (or negligibly so). With the current cheap architecture available such as Amazon’s EC2, AWS and Heroku, a lot of developers in the past can now run services that would’ve taken considerable effort a few years ago. The point has been surpassed where a developer can make a livelihood for themselves without the need for incredible technical knowledge and this trend is going to continue.

You can do more with less. Just look at Instagram. They are close to about 11 people (about 4 were hired during the past month) and have 15 million users. This is impressive and they are mainly using Amazon’s architecture.

What is starting to matter is not whether something can be done, it is whether someone will want to use it.

That is why the newly started designerfund is backed by Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. 2012 is the tipping point. They realise that what is going to make or break a start-up is not the technical infrastructure. If it is bad, your users will notice. If it is good, your users won’t notice, because that is the way it’s supposed to be. It is becoming increasingly difficult to be bad at it due to the increase in amazing infrastructure. If your design is bad, users will notice. If your design is good, your users will definitely notice it.

So, while you are learning to code with codeacademy, do also learn how to understand what makes a great user experience. Learn about design, colour patterns, visual hierarchy, Fitt’s Law, Hick’s Law, etc. Do some basic marketing courses. Read up on A/B testing. Whatever.

The startups who are a success purely based on technical merit are dwindling. You have to start producing value and a superior user experience.

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