Can you reinvent a software company by hiring a pixel pusher?

Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software wants to hire a UX/graphic design person. Here’s the meat of the job posting:

UX and Graphic Designer

At Fog Creek Software, we love great design and know how important it is. But to be honest, this is a company founded by developers, and we’re just not very good at it.

If you dare to accept this challenge, you’re going to change all that.

This is not just a job; it’s a mission. You will work on all parts of our product portfolio, improving, revamping, redecorating, and redesigning. That includes three major products currently under active development and a bunch of websites that support them. We have a wide variety of projects and a diverse selection of work to do that includes:

  • Graphic design
  • Web design
  • Print design (including brochures, logos, stationary, even the occasional book)
  • User Experience design
  • Navigation and information architecture
  • Design for usability

Qualified candidates will have extensive training and experience in a variety of aspects of design including graphic design, web design, user experience, and information architecture…

My gut reaction is: “There’s no way one person can do all that.”

It’s not just that there aren’t enough hours in a day; it’s that each of those line items are very different disciplines. You do want people with overlapping skillsets, but no great print designer is also a great web designer, and a great logo designer, and a great book designer, and a great software product designer.

Joel’s job post did get me thinking though. If I were the king of Fog Creek Software, what would I do? More to the point, how would you make user experience a core value at a mature company? If Quality is Fractal, how do you bake it in after the fact?

The good news is that Fog Creek already acts as if Quality is Fractal. The Joel Test hints at this, as do Joel’s obsessions with creating great working conditions and making workers the god of their area of responsibility.

So, here’s what I would do:

Hire a GOD of UX, not a pixel pusher.

Maybe call them the Chief Taste Officer. You’re looking for someone who is equal parts Steve Jobs, Don Draper, and Seth Godin. Assuming such a person exists (and that you can hire them) they will be responsible for Quality, top to bottom, and they’ll have the power (hiring, budget, creative authority, whatever it takes) to make it happen.

This is a pretty tall order. It may even be impossible. Apple was able to do it, but only because Steve Jobs is a genius who wanted his baby back, and Apple was circling the drain so Jobs was given the time and authority he needed to remake the company.

Maybe it is possible for a smaller company like Fog Creek to reinvent itself with a “Quality or die” approach, but can you imagine Google or Microsoft trying to do so? The engineers, MBAs, and shareholders would never stand for it.

Notes:

While writing this post, Jin Yang pointed me to this StackOverflow podcast where Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood — both programmers who hire designers — talk about Joel’s UX job posting, design in general, hiring designers, and why client and design consultant relationships go wrong. It’s worth a listen, start at about 36 minutes in.

Both of them understand that Quality can’t be tacked on, but you get a sense that like many software developers, they’re very reluctant to allow anyone else in the software design driver’s seat. I believe there are coder culture reasons for this reluctance, but that’s a topic for another time.

January 16, 2010 / Category: UX Theory

  • I just saw this post - all is true and you were very minimal in your response... but Joel comment is so frustrating...
  • I know of a few very talented people who can, and currently do, fill all of these roles at once. Knowing what I do about Fog Creek, and small software development shops in general, the owners recognize that this is just a first step to a larger design/creative presence in their organization. They kick things off with a single, brilliant individual and if things go well and that person builds trust and respect with other staff, they grow the team from there. It's a pretty common practice.
  • Based on my own personal experience, Joel's demands are not that unusual. I'm not the greatest designer in the world, but after doing it for around twelve years, I've seen the role morph quite a bit. At any given time, there are many, many job descriptions posted around the 'net that have requirements similar to Joel's. In some ways, it seems like it's pretty much par for the course nowadays.
  • I agree that Joel's job listing is not unusual, just as job listings demanding a laundry list of "PHP, PhotoShop, Java, Illustrator, Flash, FrontPage, CSS, .NET, SQL, and Unix" that offer no clue about what the job is really about are not unusual.

    Just once I'd like to read a a job post that says "We need you to accomplish X. If you can do X, we will give you the tools and authority necessary to do X."
  • Johan Strandell
    I'm inclined to agree with Nathan - print design, web design and UX design are already spanning over quite a wide field, and expecting the same person to also handle books, logos, IA and usability is quite stretching it.

    To reframe it in programming terms: this is similar to a design company wanting a developer to work with Javascript, Java, assembly, LISP, as well as the occasional Windows application and database tuning.

    It might be possible to track down a few people that can do all of those, and that even are good or great at one or two of them, but trying to match all the listed areas will likely only find habitual liars or those with inflated egos.

    In my experience interface design is a rather different skill set than print design, even though many of the fundamentals are the same. Just a like a game engine developer will need different skills than someone doing realtime AI, even though they might work on the same project and use the same programming language.

    I think the outsourcing model could work great, especially since books, stationary, etc probably aren't Fog Creek's most critical areas. Getting someone with design sense into the company is a first step, and if that person can call on more resources if/when needed, all the better.
  • Avram
    Well, seems like the last such genius died some 500 years ago: http://is.gd/65Psi Can one person really know all of this?
  • Even more important, can one person be a top notch expert in everything AND have enough time to do it all?

    Anyway, anyone that brilliant would be wasted in a small software company.
  • For what it's worth, that is exactly who we're trying to hire -- a single brilliant person.

    Most small companies don't have the luxury of legions of people, and can't hire a UI designer, UX manager, information architect, pixel pusher, creative director, stock art photography curator, and deputy editor in charge of fonts and typesetting. Even large companies that can afford to separate all those tasks just get caught up in committee meetings around every design decision. The right thing to do is for modern UI/UX/Web designers to understand the broad spectrum of product design and not force themselves into one particular ghetto of "just" fonts or "just" typesetting or "just" "user experience."
  • A single person, even if they were somehow brilliant at every task they touch, won't have enough time in the day to be a leader, understand the business, inject design culture into an entrenched programmer culture, deal with coder pushback, and do logos, colors, multiple iterations of design comps, HTML/CSS templates, etc. etc. etc.

    I know Fog Creek is small, (what, maybe 20 coders?) I'm just saying that the optimal ratio of design/UX people to programmers is probably not 1 to 20. Even companies with billions of dollars and legions of smart employees often get design wrong.

    So anyway, speaking as an armchair quarterback, I'd hire a senior UX genius with a great track record, then have that person hire 3 more multi-disciplinary creatives with web software design chops and strong tech ability. Your UX genius should then outsource any book or print design, and probably even branding (but to a great branding firm, not to a contest site or "some guy we know").

    The biggest challenges will likely be cultural and interpersonal. The UX genius must have the juice to do what needs to be done, and that means displacing whoever was making design decisions before.
  • mattejames
    I totally agree. I'm glad that Joel is looking for designers because that's the first thing I think about when I look at Stack Overflow or FogBugz - they're not attractive. And it isn't that they don't serve useful purposes, they just definitely need some design attention.
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