Holla At Ya Backpack Calendar, Or Why Startups Can’t Hire Great Designers
Monday, June 12th, 2006 by MR
About two months ago, Jason told me that he and his team at 37signals were working on a calendar. We talked for a bit about how other calendar apps suck a whole lot, and how he (and I) felt it necessary to finally build one that introduced clean design and a quality user experience to the application. In typical 37s fashion, they recorded a screencast of the calendar’s usage and posted it to their blog. Here’s a screencap:
I haven’t had the chance to play with a demo (read: I haven’t been IMd a beta URL….. yet!) but I can already tell that it’s a lot better than many of the other calendar apps out there which either suffer from a vomit-inducing design or a terrible user experience, or both. I don’t really know why some of these other calendar apps are so ugly, or why so many “Web 2.0″ startup apps/sites are ugly, but I have a theory if you’re willing to listen….
….it’s a problem with funding. Say a startup takes some outside financing. The people who gave that company the money expect some ROI, and normally the plan to spend the money initially involves office space, hiring full-time workers, and maybe throwing a party or two. Okay, well this means the company is now interested in hiring a full-time designer, but so many of the very best designers in the world either work for themselves or run little studios with a few other people and don’t want to be “hired” full-time. Because the startup can’t convince a top-tier designer to quit all his/her high-paying clients and do one thing full-time, they end up hiring a B or C-level designer who can’t produce a high quality product. And there’s your dilemma.
Sound about right, or am I totally off my rocker?
Reader Comments
16 Responses to “Holla At Ya Backpack Calendar, Or Why Startups Can’t Hire Great Designers”
Whoa. I think you hit it right on spot. The model has changed. People don’t become full time designers for just one company. Sorry. That’s just not how it works these days. If you’re good, you have more clients than you have time, and all of them want all of your time for all of their projects, and you can pick and choose who sits in your digital office and hands you real money so you can make them digital things. Because you’re good, you don’t want a single relationship deal. Because that’s how this world is. This world isn’t about the old model. The model where you go through college, a job, a raise, another raise, a mortgage, a second mortgage, a raise, retirement, death. no. that is gone. There is no such thing as job security. “Security” is knowing that you can take your talents wherever you go, and make money by using them. Security is having people lined up through 6 months begging for a piece of your time. Security being able to take your business wherever you want, in whatever direction you want..
You are so right.
June 12th, 2006 at 2:23 am
I think you are dead on!, I’d say its “the problem” that reflects the time we live in today. Not enough people understand that design and usability should come first, not second, third or fourth.
June 12th, 2006 at 2:57 am
That sounds about right but also extends to the “Little Studios” as I cannot find a A-level designer to join us and expand the team. Working for yourself is altogether too attractive these days :)
We work with a couple of companies as you describe above and what they often do is use us for developing the higher end style guides and get a junior designer in house to carry through those styles on a day to day basis. Its not ideal but it is a compromise they are happy with.
June 12th, 2006 at 4:42 am
Yep, that sounds about right Mike. I’m about to make the jump into fulltime freelance and I shudder a little at wanting to be hired ‘full-time’, simply because I don’t think it’s sustainable, or creatively challenging, for a designer to work client side.
June 12th, 2006 at 5:09 am
Doesn’t explain the mingingness of GCal though - however I use it because it works.
The BackPack cal might get me back to BackPack though (especially if I can email it events), as I ditched it a while ago for a Moleskine + Flickr
June 12th, 2006 at 6:50 am
The premise sounds good, but I think it’s false. Yes, great designers help make designs great - but that’s not necessarily the real issue at hand here. With 37signals you have a group committed to brining the simplest UI that could possibly work to the fore. That doesn’t often happen.
It’s that commitment which is lacking from many teams. I’m sure 37signals probably started out with a clunkier interface with a few more items. But they slowly stripped it back with questions like “Are we really going to ever use that feature?” “Boy, that’s kind of ugly isn’t it?” and “What’s this really saying?”
For our products we spend very little time getting a mock-up going just to see that everything works. Then we spend a very long time refining it. We think that the simplest UI that can possibly work is probably the best. My current UI has 2 video feeds, one text box, and 9 status indicators. My goal is to get it down to 1 video feed, 1 text box, and 1 status indicator through some judicious pruning.
Maybe it’s a Tufte thing, but I want every pixel to mean something. A top notch designer (some, not all)can speed that process along - but it’s not an exclusive domain. It’s all about a fundamental commitment to making the best possible product. Having money to burn is a secondary issue.
June 12th, 2006 at 8:42 am
I think your assertion hold true, even outside of startup companies. There are many small and large companies that either don don’t know what a good designer is, or don’t realize that most of the best designers aren’t available for full-time hire. The same is true in the SEO industry, and the same is becoming more and more true with web developers (guys that can do it all, not just the ones that can code…).
My solution? Find a B-level guy that knows he’s a B-level guy, who knows who the A-level guys are, and aspires to be an A-level guy. Then you’ll probably end up with a guy who occasionally puts out A-level designs, without paying for an A-level salary.
June 12th, 2006 at 8:56 am
You definitely sound right! I have yet to find a nice calendar online. Googles calendar is the closest thing to nice that I have seen. The problem I find is everyone builds it online, and then thats it. What if I want to export it to my iCal? What if I want to setup alerts to my email about certain events? What if I want to allow others to subscribe - or what if I want to subscribe to other calendars?
The above calendar looks alot like iCal. I wont use online calendars, because I keep so much inside of my iCal - work schedules, home schedules, outside events, and several other calendars I am subscribed to. There hasnt been anything that competes with this that makes me compelled to use it. I can sync my iCal with my iPod and take it on the road. I can setup iCal to email me or alert me when I am on my computer.
Now, the one thing I DONT like about iCal is that I have to pay for a .mac membership to sync my calendar with my wifes computer. Thats the big thing, we want to be able to share without paying for another service. So, if we had a calendar we could use online, and then subscribe in each others iCal - that would work (but we still need to use iCal).
Looking good so far! I cant wait to see the finished product!
June 12th, 2006 at 9:33 am
If that’s the case, what’s to stop the startup from hiring the designer or small studio on more of a contractual basis, at least for the initial push?
June 12th, 2006 at 10:16 am
Mike, nothing’s stopping it, and I think that is the key here. Too many startups feel as though they need to get some warm bodies in chairs to feel “like a real company” even at the expense of the user experience or design. A little while ago the nice people at Meebo contacted me for some redesign work, however it was a full-time gig in California and not a client project, so I had to turn it down.
An interesting thing to note though, is that hiring a full-time designer is a lot more costly than simply hiring him or her as a consultant, at least in the design industry. I’m throwing out some fake numbers here, but what if 30boxes wanted a fresh redesign of their product, how much would it cost to hire one designer as a consultant? $10k? 20k? More than that? Well although those numbers are high for a webapp redesign, they are still much smaller than the cost of hiring someone full-time and paying for them to move to California.
I really think that the idea that top talent can be bought and reined in to one central location is the “old business” way of doing it. If the best Ruby on Rails developer lives in Stockholm and the designer you want to snag is in Singapore, I think that it’s doing your business a disservice by “settling” for developer X and designer Y simply because they live within a 10 mile radius from your new office.
June 12th, 2006 at 11:32 am
I think this application is going to be a nice addition to backpack. And knowing the way 37s works, they will probably come out with a nice api that will plugin to other applications.
As for the designers, I think your right for 80% of the time. There are other times that companies want a great designer, but they don’t want to shell out benjies. I’ve seen that happen way too often with good friends of mine. Which just brings us back to companies not really appreciating a real “web designer” and what they can to to help increase the ROI of a product.
June 12th, 2006 at 11:41 am
To me it seems that there simply are not enough good designers to go around. Used to be you’d have to be a pretty large company to consider bringing design in house. Now, it’s almost unheard of to be a web company without an internal designer, no matter how small you are.
As for the 37signals calander, I agree with Nate. I loved it the first time i saw it when it was called iCal. Although I do wish Apple would add the ability to specify the event date range by typing it after the event name.
June 12th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
Mike,
Great post. I completely agree with this assertion. Lots of people could use an A-list guy on a temp basis, then have them set the standards, and have the in house guy continue from there. Although personally I think it would suck for the in house guy to be told “you aren’t really as good as we’d hoped, watch this guy work his magic, and then copy his style.”
The freelance a-lister (or B - lister) is good for companies who don’t have a dedicated in house design guy too. It can help them get a proof of concept out the door fast. I would also venture to say that VCs are more likely to like usable and attractive apps than stuff designed by google engineers (its harder for them to envision your ultimate goal).
June 12th, 2006 at 9:48 pm
There are only two ways for a startup to attract top talent–throwing buckets of money at them now, or a credible claim on future buckets of money later. Both buckets require the same thing: a sound idea to solve a business problem that a given market would find value in. Buckets or no, a half-baked idea is unlikely to attract a top designer (or a top-anything, for that matter) and it probably wont attract venture capital beyond a small angel seed, or family loan.
Which brings me to my real point, I guess–how are any of these going to make any money?
June 13th, 2006 at 7:07 am
If investors and management can see ‘design and usability’ as part of the package, then we won’t have such a dilemma/problem. But unfortunately, up until this very day, D&U has always been outside the package.
June 15th, 2006 at 12:28 pm
Ohhhhhh…..you are so on it!!! To back that claim even further is to simply mosy-on-over to Craigslist and see selection companies are choosing from.
August 14th, 2006 at 9:57 am
Add Your Comment
Comments are moderated because spam's not tolerated.
