oh, okay then.. you can have it https://brynet.ca/
How dare you run a website without some sort of React framework.
sorry
Your website is not for you
21–30 of 207 posts
Re: Your website is not for you
#22I have felt this a lot when designing the landing page for my SQL canvas side project. _I_ really want to write about DuckDB WASM, pre-signed URLs and how cool Cloudflare's durable objects are. But my target audience are data analysts, and they just want to analyze some data! I have gone through a lot of design revisions because I have a hard time containing my technical excitement. I was surprised how hard communica…
Maybe that's why I am not in your target audience, but love how the design looks. I have bookmarked it also.
You show so many features and it is nice in the way it is being presented and is also mobile friendly. Also I too am a fan of neobrutalism. :)
Re: Your website is not for you
#23“A website isn't art. It's a tool with one job: get the user to do the thing they came for.”
Eh, I don’t think this is accurate. A website does serve utility, but if you remove art from the discussion, then it becomes soulless, which is not the world we want to live in.
Take HN for example. The first time I visited, I thought it was a terrible, dated design. But over time I grew to appreciate it. I think it is, in fact, quite artistic; it has a style, it makes a statement.
If HN were “modern and user-first” maybe users would have an initial better impression, maybe they would even “convert” better initially. But long-term, it would start to lose its soul.
Re: Your website is not for you
#24This is a job for people like me: product / project managers who work on a project to translate business (and audience!) needs into specifics around design and build. It's a skill all of its own, and it requires time and effort and expertise - it won't just emerge naturally, it won't happen without time thinking about strategy, audience, metrics, goals.
We spend a whole bunch of time when we're running projects pushing back and telling clients to "think less like you and more like your audience". It's not surprising to me that clients come with pre-set notions: of course they do, it's their business, they're in it all day every day, and they're thinking about it all the time. This doesn't make them good at thinking about this stuff from alternative / audience angles!
Re: Your website is not for you
#25I have felt this a lot when designing the landing page for my SQL canvas side project. _I_ really want to write about DuckDB WASM, pre-signed URLs and how cool Cloudflare's durable objects are. But my target audience are data analysts, and they just want to analyze some data! I have gone through a lot of design revisions because I have a hard time containing my technical excitement. I was surprised how hard communica…
Maybe that's why I am not in your target audience, but love how the design looks. I have bookmarked it also. You show so many features and it is nice in the way it is being presented and is also mobile friendly. Also I too am a fan of neobrutalism. :)
Thank you! :-)
Re: Your website is not for you
#26Counterpoint: yes it is.
perhaps, before the thread derails into a bunch of comments like the parent, we should consider that the article is not a comment on what your side-projects look like, those obviously should look however you please. rather the comment is directed at folks who want both great UX, and for their taste to reflected on the website, and quite frankly: some of you have absolutely no sense of what usability affordances requi…
Counterpoint: that's also wrong and those who give up the idea of their website being for "them" (a person or group) end up making websites that are bad. Jakob's law is often taken as support for the opposite position, but if Google looked like search engines circa 1998, no one would have switched.
Re: Your website is not for you
#27If you're in this comment section, consider play-testing your website. Find someone who has never used it and watch them explore it for the first time, while they think out loud, without giving them any help. My personal website had links to GitHub, LinkedIn, etc. on the home page, and the first thing my brother in law did was leave the site, without ever looking at any of my posts, which were indexed on another page.
This example might be obvious to you, but I guarantee there's something you can learn through play-testing.
Re: Your website is not for you
#28The only problem with this analysis is that in practice a lot of the designers don't understand the customer and don't understand the business. Don't understand the market, at least compared to the founders or people who've been in the space for a long time.
So there's a bit of a false confidence where the designers think they know what's really right because they did "scientific approach". But in reality the founders actually more correct.
Re: Your website is not for you
#29“A website isn't art. It's a tool with one job: get the user to do the thing they came for.” Eh, I don’t think this is accurate. A website does serve utility, but if you remove art from the discussion, then it becomes soulless, which is not the world we want to live in. Take HN for example. The first time I visited, I thought it was a terrible, dated design. But over time I grew to appreciate it. I think it is, in fa…
Yeah I think the whole "the website is to help the user do a job" mostly exists to give people who do UX a position of authority. The user needs to do a job; we can't pre-specify that job entirely; users who are frustrated in their job will leave with it incomplete. Those three things are totally true, but they are often used to justify a third thing: input on website design should be driven by user feedback, filtered through UX research. A refusal of the third thing is where you get design like HN. You can do UX research; everyone should. But if it is more than merely an input into design, you become rudderless.
Re: Your website is not for you
#30The problem is that user research and competitive research are also not the truth. I prefer to ship something I know I like than what someone else thinks a third abstract person might like.