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Ask HN: What to do as a back-end dev and with many app ideas but can't do UX?
11–20 of 59 posts
Re: Ask HN: What to do as a back-end dev and with many app ideas but can't do UX?
#12[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What to do as a back-end dev and with many app ideas but can't do UX?
#13Honestly, just use Bootstrap. You're exactly the kind of person it's made for.
Re: Ask HN: What to do as a back-end dev and with many app ideas but can't do UX?
#14[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What to do as a back-end dev and with many app ideas but can't do UX?
#15I would say that your best bet is to stick with an established front end library. Bootstrap[1] is the most well known, but there are others such as UI Kit (not to be confused with Apple's UIKit for iOS)[2].
If you'd like some additional advice, feel free to contact me (email should be in my profile).
Re: Ask HN: What to do as a back-end dev and with many app ideas but can't do UX?
#16Check out the book design for hackers, learn your way around sketch (it's easier than you think), and try cloning things from dribbble and what not
Re: Ask HN: What to do as a back-end dev and with many app ideas but can't do UX?
#17For some perspective: take a few sites that you use every day (e.g. Google, possibly Facebook, any news site that you visit regularly) and check on First Versions (http://www.firstversions.com/) to see what their first publicly available iterations look like. If that doesn't lower your bar for visual design, nothing will :)
Remember also that many "minimalist" / "undesigned" sites (e.g. Craigslist) are quite popular. "Good" design isn't necessarily more elaborate or complicated; often users will prefer an interface that is concise and clear with a few well-thought-out options to one that looks nicer but is unusable.
I'm no designer myself, but I've done a passable job of maintaining reasonable design in my projects with a few principles: understand what your users want to do, then help them do that; use visual cues consistently (contrast, color, size, font weight, etc.); pick easily readable fonts; and so on.
A bit of reading up on design from various perspectives helps. Here's some of my favorite resources: https://www.nngroup.com/reports/, The Design of Everyday Things, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/, Understanding Comics (no, seriously! A lot of "sequential art" principles transfer well to web design), https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility (accessibility isn't just about helping the disabled; a more accessible site is, well, more accessible to everyone).
Also, learn to use the tools that are out there. There are color pickers to help you build reasonable color schemes, font libraries (e.g. Google Web Fonts) for easy-to-use readable fonts, icon libraries (e.g. Noun Project) for decent icons covering common user actions. CSS3 itself has many goodies (transitions, ::before / ::after pseudo-classes, etc.), and is worth learning in detail.
Even if you end up working with designers - I certainly do for many projects - it's worth your time to understand the basic principles.
Re: Ask HN: What to do as a back-end dev and with many app ideas but can't do UX?
#18I think the most important thing is that you are motivated to create a web-app in the first place — this should give you mental leverage to learn how to do UI / UX properly, if you have the time to go down that route.
As someone who started off as a non-designer programmer, I taught myself UI/UX just by practising a lot. The two ways (that in hindsight were the most invaluable) I improved were to:
• Read highly-praised books on design fundamentals... These two literally changed the way I make / look at everything that is graphic design related: 1. The Non-Designers Design Book [1]; 2. Know Your Onions [2]. The third I can recommend is all about making websites / UX and covers everything you need to think about when you're working on a web project: 3. Don't Make Me Think (Revisited) [3]. All three are very well-reviewed and have changed people's lives.
• Copy everything you like the look of. What are your favourite web apps / pages / interfaces? What makes them tick? Try and copy sections that you like to give you a feel for how things should be laid-out. Most crucially, use a vector graphics program (I cannot recommend Affinity Designer enough, not least because it is insanely cheap for what it is), and copy as many icons / vector images as you can. Learn the fundamentals of bezier curves and how almost every piece of graphic artwork is made up of different combinations / layerings of shapes... Forget about fancy effects (e.g. shadows, gradients) at first, and just copy the shapes themselves. This was my biggest revelation and improved my UI ability to that of a professional standard. Once you realise that a fancy padlock icon [4] is just a rounded rectangle with a circle and triangle in it merged together, you'll start being able to recreate neat icons really easily.
If you don't enjoy doing any of the above, then hire a professional designer :) There really are no other 'ways of dealing with it' than doing it yourself or using a service. But trust me, it is well within reach to get yourself to a decent level in just a few months.
[1] - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Robin-Wil... [2] - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Know-Your-Onions-Creative-Businessm... [3] - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usability... [4] - https://cfl.dropboxstatic.com/static/images/business/homepag...
Re: Ask HN: What to do as a back-end dev and with many app ideas but can't do UX?
#19I would say that your best bet is to stick with an established front end library. Bootstrap[1] is the most well known, but there are others such as UI Kit (not to be confused with Apple's UIKit for iOS)[2]. If you'd like some additional advice, feel free to contact me (email should be in my profile). [1] https://getbootstrap.com/ [2] https://getuikit.com/
Be aware that these still require you to have at least a basic understanding of CSS and HTML (the more you need to customize it, the more you'll need to know). Nothing crazy, but don't expect it to be a drag and drop designer.
For Bootstrap (UI Kit might be the same but I haven't used it) your best option is to look at their examples[1], find one you like, then view the source code from it. Use that as your starting page and go from there.
But like I said: any customizing, tweaking, etc will require you to know some HTML and CSS.
Re: Ask HN: What to do as a back-end dev and with many app ideas but can't do UX?
#20I literally have experienced this same issue, and was lucky enough to work for a company where building UI/UX around APIs _is_ the product. We're a no-code (but code-extensible) UI platform.
This isn't meant to be a marketing message, I really actually build UI's around internal API's I write all the time. It is honestly great for side projects and we have multiple F500 organizations that use it at scale as well.