Ask HN: How do you manage UI/UX for your side projects?

for UI, HTML5 Boilerplate will get you pretty far when it comes to organizing markup. Then you can start with something like Bootstrap and then build a theme when you're ready. There's some truly impressive pre-built bootstrap themes/templates out there too but they take a lot of work to integrate into your project.

As for UX, if you have a spouse/partner/SO ask them to use your project and take their feedback seriously. Getting actual people to use what you've built is the fastest way to a decent UX. You have to set aside your ego and let the users dictate how they want their experience to be. It's non-trivial.

Is it a project where one of the most important aspects of how it works will be the design, if so maybe you can trade with a designer or even pay one for some help. If it isn't the most important thing try to find a theme or example in a common framework that will be passable.

For example let's say you're making a project that will help companies manage real time logging of data more efficiently.

Once a basic level of design competence is reached pretty much nobody who is looking for something like that cares too much how your site looks. You could make a simple landing page with a bootstrap theme in a few hours.

Bootstrap is so antiquated. It is also far from easy, and even if you learn a lot about bootstrap is will not make your project suddenly look good. Not to mention the container system is one of the most confusing things I have ever seen, but maybe that is just me.

I'm building a mobile app using flutter, which has so far been an excellent experience. They've announced development of a web version of it - hummingbird (https://medium.com/flutter-io/hummingbird-building-flutter-f...) which I'll be keeping a close eye on. Not only is it a fundamentally productive toolkit to use, but sharing both business and UI code between all frontends (desktop, mobile and web) would be wonderful.

I've also heard some positive things about elm-ui (https://github.com/mdgriffith/elm-ui), which is on my todo list to investigate.

I stick with a few basic guidelines:

* Sketch out the idea on literal paper before committing it to working code. Paper is so much easier to get 'working'.

* Borrow visually from other sites that I like and have similar intent. I don't have the time on side projects to go crazy breaking new UX ground. (And users probably don't want that anyway.)

* Keep the idea simple and uncluttered. Maybe a specialist could get away with fancy stuff, but I'm not a specialist.

* Try to offload functionality into the back end. If I can simplify the user experience by making the back end more intelligent, I do it.

* Be very cautious about introducing technical complexity. Usually for side projects, I have a specific goal I want to achieve and limited time in which to achieve it. I'd rather not spend that time messing around with some fancy framework, unless I'm convinced I need it to satisfy my goal.

* Reuse from my other work.There are a lot of aspects of, say, a website, that don't have to be uniquely redone for each. So it might quickly become cost effective to factor out something like a login flow UX. (And has the benefit of offering some degree of consistency across projects...)