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What you should know as a founder of a software company

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Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#11

Post by ivm »

pier25 wrote: post #6
ukulele wrote: post #4

> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…

As a front end dev / designer I used to agree with the author, but now I think it depends. Wikipedia, Reddit, even HN are great examples of successful projects with good enough UI. Even Gmail or Facebook had terrible UI when launched. If you are solving a unique problem, UI is not so important.

Author here, I agree that "good enough UI" will do but I can't remember Wikipedia or Gmail having a terrible user experience on launch.

In case of Reddit and HN, I started to use them many years after I learned about them – mostly because of the weird UX. I still prefer hckrnews.com for HN.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#12

Post by save_ferris »

How many TechCrunch articles can you find where an acquiring company says "the software we're buying doesn't really work, but it sure looks good!"?

I just left a job where the founder (who didn't have any software background) deeply ingrained himself with this philosophy and wound making life a living hell for engineering.

While building a full-stack prototype, we slapped bootstrap 4 on the front end because who has time to roll CSS when the project is months behind schedule?

The founder with no sofware experience decided that bootstrap was terrible and that he'd roll an entirely custom app style. So he went into the codebase on a weekend and ripped out all the views/controllers/assets and replaced them with his own, which massively broke the test suite on Monday morning (which of course he didn't know how to operate or fix.) After a couple of other "executive audibles" like this, I took the next good offer and ran.

It's weird to see 'visual design' as a mainstay of an article titled 'What you should know as a founder of a software company', as if managing a team and building solid engineering fundamentals and culture are either assumed or unimportant.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#13

Post by KGIII »

idlewords wrote: post #2

One thing not on this list that is an easy win is to make your pages fast. This will separate you from 90%+ of competitors. A lot of the bloat in modern web apps and web pages is easy to remove, and people will love you for it. I never mentioned it in Pinboard marketing, but I moved heaven and earth to keep the site fast for everyone, and it was speed that gave the site its first toehold. That said, I think the leap…

Would that be covered under UX? Loading speed seems like something that would be under the UX heading, at least it is as I understand it.

Also, when we started to model pedestrian traffic, we also began to start on the long road to releasing software so that we could sell the software and the companies could model their own traffic. (Many companies consider such data to be proprietary and it can be difficult working for them because of their protective nature.)

We were able to get consultation through Jacob Nielson. He was still fairly new to the game (early 2000s) and things like eye tracking were just coming into the fray. I wasn't able to attend any of his meetings and didn't have much to do with the specifics.

But, my employees were happy with him and our customers were happy with the results. He's mentioned in the article by NN Group, which is Nielsen Norman Group.

The employees were happy and, as mentioned, so weren't our clients. They were also able to take what they learned and apply it to our internal applications and processes. (UX is much more than UI.) This, in turn, helped us more than what we'd expected. I distinctly recall QA being happy with a number of changes.

But, it points to the value of good UX and the benefit of getting a professional to consult or, perhaps, directly on staff.

Because of my lack of direct involvement, I'm not going to specifically recommend them - I don't feel as though I'm qualified to do so. I will say that the results were very good.

We'd chosen them because one of our employees had been following their site and was very impressed with the work they were doing with regards to web sites. It was that same employee who had recommended we get a UX consultant in, in the first place. Given the results, I am happy to have listened.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#14

Post by ivm »

save_ferris wrote: post #12

How many TechCrunch articles can you find where an acquiring company says "the software we're buying doesn't really work, but it sure looks good!"? I just left a job where the founder (who didn't have any software background) deeply ingrained himself with this philosophy and wound making life a living hell for engineering. While building a full-stack prototype, we slapped bootstrap 4 on the front end because who has…

It's not a mainstay, I wrote that you don't need to focus on design instead of functionality and that a $50 template will be ok.

The goal is to develop a sense of good design, so you can pick a good template or hire good designers later and argue about the results of their work.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#16

Post by daleco »

gr33nman wrote: post #9
idlewords wrote: post #2

One thing not on this list that is an easy win is to make your pages fast. This will separate you from 90%+ of competitors. A lot of the bloat in modern web apps and web pages is easy to remove, and people will love you for it. I never mentioned it in Pinboard marketing, but I moved heaven and earth to keep the site fast for everyone, and it was speed that gave the site its first toehold. That said, I think the leap…

How did you determine that speed was what gave the site its first toehold? Did you collect some kind of data that supported your internal push to make that a priority?

It depends on the use case but loading time is very important. People will engage more with a site where they can move freely and focus on the content rather than a loading page. The longer the loading time the more likely users will click away.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#18

Post by john_moscow »

save_ferris wrote: post #12

How many TechCrunch articles can you find where an acquiring company says "the software we're buying doesn't really work, but it sure looks good!"? I just left a job where the founder (who didn't have any software background) deeply ingrained himself with this philosophy and wound making life a living hell for engineering. While building a full-stack prototype, we slapped bootstrap 4 on the front end because who has…

It keeps on puzzling me why don't engineers ever speak up. Like "Hey, man, I understand the old design sucks and you want to make it better, but editing things directly would only make the delays bigger. How about you take a few screenshots of the product, photoshop it the way you would like it to look and then we, as a technical team, will use our best expertise to make it look this way without breaking everything in pieces?".

That could have saved you from weeks of hell and would also increase your influence by a great amount.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#19

Post by piptastic »

ivm wrote: post #11
pier25 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a front end dev / designer I used to agree with the author, but now I think it depends. Wikipedia, Reddit, even HN are great examples of successful projects with good enough UI. Even Gmail or Facebook had terrible UI when launched. If you are solving a unique problem, UI is not so important.

Author here, I agree that "good enough UI" will do but I can't remember Wikipedia or Gmail having a terrible user experience on launch. In case of Reddit and HN, I started to use them many years after I learned about them – mostly because of the weird UX. I still prefer hckrnews.com for HN.

Who do you use instead of craigslist?

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#20

Post by ivm »

rmdoss wrote: post #15

Too much content without addressing the real problem with most startups: They do not solve a customer problem. Solve their problem, make their life better and you will do well.

This is mentioned in the "Marketing" part as one of the core research questions. I agree that it should be addressed more but didn't want to overload the article – it's long enough already.
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