In all of my days of building tech systems and businesses, I have observed that what matters most is not how it looks but how it works. You have to keep asking yourself over and over again: this thing I am building, is it functional?
Design is not just how it looks, it is about how it works.
That sentence looks so straightforward, yet so many people just don’t get it. They keep designing things might look beautiful to the beholder, yet totally useless when it comes to achieving the set task.
When building tech systems, the most important thing to ask includes things like “how obvious are the call-to-actions?”, “Will our users need to consult a manual before they can use the service?”, and “How can we reduce the number of steps required to get things done?”
If your focus is on actually building tech systems that make money, you want to be more obsessed with the functionality of what you are building and not the fancy graphics. I am speaking from personal experience here.
I worked on Gistcaster for over a year before I made some change by serving a little advert. On the other hand, ZabarSMS was not so polished or beautiful on the day we launched it, but it was functional – the goal was to send bulk SMS, and it did that very well and so, the platform started making us money from day 1.
The focus on Gistcaster was to make it cool, more features to make the experience of posting or commenting or sharing on Gistcaster as nice as possible. Nothing of real economic benefit or tangible business advantage.
People on the consumer side want it beautiful, people on the business side wants it functional!
It needs to be functional.
