IMO, everyone designs. In other words, your app will be designed by someone — no doubt about it. But there are those who are more educated, more practiced, more gifted, and sometimes more intelligent, and therefor more apt to hit upon the right combination of things that make a product successful.

It would be nice if people with “designer” in their title were more likely to fall into the above category, but unfortunately two issues tend to muddle up this reality:

1. Some “non-designers” are also able to arrive at good design; either by accident (as you point out) or by advanced skill/intuition.

2. MANY “designers” are not good designers. In fact, many are extremely BAD designers.

These issues have a way of skewing our general understanding of the designer and their market. As a designer myself, I can tell you it’s both pleasant (when I find a non-designer with a good knack for it) and frustrating (when I come across people who claim to be designers but have no business saying so).

Google is an example of great design. One textbox, one button, easy to use and deliver’s google’s brand message: ‘we are search’. It doesn’t have to have rounded corners to be well designed. Same thing with facebook (well up until fb 2.0 I would say), an app designed to deliver information to users and stimulate communication. It succeeds at both. Of course there is room for improvement, but they’ve done a pretty good job.

I could have written a post that said ‘well in some cases it’s ok not to use a designer’ but it wouldn’t have had the power of ‘you are not a designer’. The point I am making is that while in some cases programmers or other non-designers can come up with a good solution by accident or luck, designers are trained in understanding users and solving communication and usability problems. And that most people don’t realize how bad they are at design because they don’t respect that designing blind (without understanding the principles of what makes things work), is just the same as writing code without ever reading a book on programming foundations. You might get lucky and have something that works, but that doesn’t mean that having an education doesn’t greatly improve your chances of creating something that works well.

Compare the few lucky standout products you mentioned with the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of terrible ones and you’ll see what I mean when I say people don’t realize how bad they are when they create them.

If you’re not willing to take the time to be great in a particular area, partner with someone who has that expertise.

Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, and Muhammad Ali are all masters in their fields. And each one needed a coach to get there!

One of the interesting things you’ll find in Steve Jobs’s biography is how he points to a typography class he happened to take in directing the idea that the Mac should have good typography and font selection. This is not something Bill Gates would come up with. He’s a great businessman and probably a pretty damn good engineer, but a designer he’s not, so his company was not run in the same way as Steve ran his.

I also think it has to do with the design dictatorship at Apple vs design by committee at MS. It’s always hard to tell people that they don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to design, because everyone has an opinion, and as my post points out, everyone thinks their opinion is valid. I think at Apple it’s been made clear that your opinion doesn’t matter.

As far as MS creating ‘far more successful’ products, while it’s true they dominated and still dominate the market for most of their niches, a lot of that is attributed to early mover advantage and sheer money pumped into marketing and exploiting distribution channels set up early in the game (OEM Windows shipped with PC’s). How many people do you know that truly _love_ their microsoft products in the way that apple users love theirs.

Myspace is a terribly designed site that happened to be in the right place at the right time and had a large enough spam list that they could acquire users rapidly. Anyway, I wasn’t suggesting that good design alone is responsible for Apple’s success, or that badly designed products can’t be successful (clearly they are), just trying to make people recognize that design is not an intuitive discipline that anyone can do, but requires knowledge and practice like anything else.

I think it’s more about guidance, dedication and timing. Clearly, MS created far more successful products for years. Apple was struggling in terms of the mainstream market until the ipod came out. But through all those years, they stayed true to the overall concept and when the time came, they were able to capitalize on its success. Microsoft on the other hand panicked and completely overhauled their platform at first signs of serious competition. So instead of innovation came imitation. I think the talent was there, it was just guided in the wrong direction.

I completely agree with you that it’s important to work with professionals and understand your own limitations. But hiring the right talent and guiding them in the right direction is a far greater challenge.