{"id":2989,"date":"2013-10-09T12:27:01","date_gmt":"2013-10-09T12:27:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/insideintercom.io\/?p=2989"},"modified":"2025-01-07T16:58:15","modified_gmt":"2025-01-07T16:58:15","slug":"how-to-hire-designers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/how-to-hire-designers\/","title":{"rendered":"How to hire designers"},"content":{"rendered":"

A beautiful product that solves a problem no one has will fail.\u00a0An ugly product that solves a real problem well can succeed.<\/p>\n

There has been a fantastic response to the post on the Dribbblisation of Design<\/a>, many people agreeing with the premise and adding to it, some disagreeing and offering counter points. I want to respond to people’s commentary, explain the original motivation for the post which wasn’t about Dribbble specifically, and talk about how we hire designers.<\/p>\n

There is a vicious cycle of misunderstanding design<\/h2>\n

For years the importance of great design in software development was underestimated and misunderstood. Designers the world over lamented that their colleagues in Product Management and Engineering were asking them for a visual treatment of something already defined. They mockingly referred to themselves as “Photoshop monkeys”. Designers in the “Photoshop monkey” role were always looking out for a new team, a new job. They knew this wasn’t what design was about.<\/p>\n

Many people worked tirelessly for years to change this misunderstanding, to explain that design was not about how something looks, but how it works. Steve Jobs said it best:<\/p>\n

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it\u2019s this veneer \u2014 that the designers are handed this box and told, \u2018Make it look good!\u2019 That\u2019s not what we think design is. It\u2019s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Slowly but surely, software companies realised that design led companies were outperforming competitors, Apple being the most obvious and most profitable example.<\/p>\n

This increase in understanding the power of great design has led to more and more design jobs, and more and more companies knowing they need great design to compete. However, these same companies don’t really understand what they need, it’s a new discipline to them, and so go to places like Dribbble to find “good designers”. But Dribbble isn’t representative of what design really is. And therein lies the vicious cycle:<\/p>\n

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The aggregate results of this vicious cycle moves our craft backwards because it perpetuates a misunderstanding of design, the myth that design is primarily about aesthetics. So visual designers are hired by these recruiters, expecting them to be great product designers, setting everyone up to fail.<\/p>\n

Visual design doesn’t exist in a vacuum<\/h2>\n

In the first post<\/a>, I walked through four layers of design:<\/p>\n