When design outweighs the technology
When anyone can rent servers by the hour and build on free software, the hard part of a consumer product moves from the machine room to the screen.
Design is more important than technology in most consumer applications.
Dave McClure ran marketing at PayPal in its early years, wrote a widely used set of startup metrics in 2007, and last year started 500 Startups, a seed fund that makes a point of backing designers as founders. His claim is partly a bet and partly a description of what changed in the past decade.
Ten years ago, launching a web product meant buying servers, licensing databases and hiring people to keep them running. The technology was expensive, and a company that could build it had an advantage. Since then, open-source software, frameworks that make common tasks quick and services that rent computing power by the hour have made the basic machinery of a consumer application cheap and widely available. Two developers can now build in a month what used to take a funded team a year. When everyone can build the product, the advantage goes to whoever makes it pleasant and clear to use.
Instagram is the example of the moment. It launched last October as a simple iPhone app for taking photos, applying a filter and sharing them. The technology is modest, and other photo apps existed. What drew more than a million users within three months was how quickly it worked and how good the results looked. The design was the product.
McClure’s own metrics point the same way. His framework follows users from the moment they arrive to the moment they pay, and most of the losses along that path are design failures: a confusing sign-up, an empty first screen, a feature nobody can find.
The word “most” carries the qualification, and it matters. Some consumer products still win on technology. Google’s search results, the video compression that makes streaming possible over ordinary connections and the maps in a phone all depend on hard engineering that design cannot replace. A beautiful search engine with poor results would lose to an ugly one with good results. Business software is a different case again, where features, integration and reliability often count for more than looks.
Design also depends on technology in ways the line hides. A pleasant experience needs speed, and speed at scale is an engineering problem. Instagram’s founders have had to work hard just to keep the service running as users arrived.
For a consumer startup, the line is really advice about where to put its best people first. If the technology is available off the shelf, the difference will be in the design, and a team without a strong designer is choosing to compete on the dimension where it has no edge.