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Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

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Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#111

Post by asoneth »

rich_sasha wrote: post #61
hliyan wrote: post #29

To me, peak usability was 25 years ago, when most applications had a toolbar and a menu that followed a standard pattern. If you're a frequent, non-power-user, you use the toolbar (e.g. "insert row" button). If you're an infrequent non-power-user, you go through the menu (Insert > Row Above). If you're a power user, you remember the shortcuts indicated through underlined letters in menu labels (e.g. Alt, I, A). If yo…

One of the most expensive pieces of software around is a Bloomberg Terminal, with base price starting at 20k/yr/license, plus more for extra data. And the UI, when you first use it, is beyond clunky. It looks seriously like a piece of stone age technology, adapted from clay tablets. Even the styling is like 80s films about edgy hackers and their punch cards. Except when you talk to the grey hairs, you realize that UI…

> no ... rewrites in Svelte or whatever

The vast majority of the terminal interface has been rewritten more than once, but the UX framework team does a great job mimicking the prior look and feel each time. Though if you know what to look for you can spot functions that haven't been updated in a while, and even a handful that have remained unchanged since the beginning.

> no refreshed new looks or skins

Basically right, though Launchpad was completely new and PDFU COLORS provides color themes intended for folks with color-vision deficiency.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#112

Post by [deleted] »

dave_sid wrote: post #8
yapyap wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article writer is talking about if many companies do it there’s probably a reason for it, with UX and as an example things like email buttons, etc. A strong but unspoken rule when anyone gives you advice is (and I feel like not everyone knows this anymore so this bears repeating): use your critical thinking skills to decide if the advice is applicable and appropriate for your situation.

There may be a reason for it, but best to understand what that reason is before applying the same approach.

[deleted]

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#113

Post by hinkley »

nostrademons wrote: post #54
conductr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At all times, people that are proficient at a green screen terminal application will prefer it to a web based or GUI based experience. They have muscle memory and a lot of codes memorized to switch back and forth from screen to screen extremely fast and exactly how many tabs to hit to fill out a form. It has nothing to do with SPA or whatever is currently new and flashy this has been going on for decades. The fact th…

You could still do this in the GUIs of 25 years ago, you'd just memorize the keyboard shortcuts and use them. They'd buffer so you could type a series of operations faster than the screen could render them, and basically every function was accessible from the keyboard. But the GUI had the advantage of discoverability - if you didn't know the keyboard shortcut, you could just work your way through the menus and find i…

But it’s true that the menu systems often made the accelerations and afterthought, and regularly used functions for some people had no shortcuts and no way to set them.

I still think a World of Warcraft style action bar, user configurable and multilayered, would work just fine for power users. You can put anything you want in position eight but most people have the same things set for 1-5.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#114

Post by asoneth »

dave_sid wrote: post #2

Doing something because all the big companies do it also leads to cargo cult mentality. You should know exactly why you are building every little part of your system. “Oh Google used a really annoying captcha on that page, I better do that as Google knows best”. Have some confidence and don’t assume that other bigger companies are smarter than you are, think about what you can improve. Most of what Google have to off…

> You should know exactly why you are building every little part of your system.

As a UX designer/researcher who focuses on exploring novel interfaces, if every company rethought their UI from scratch that would be great for my job security. But realistically there are good reasons why most companies default to following established UI conventions:

First, your users generally have significantly more experience using products from big companies than yours, and differences are often perceved as problems. See Jakob's law.

Second, sometimes a company that releases a novel solution does fantastically well. But more often than not it ends up being a lesson in why the convention existed in the first place. See Chesterton's fence.

Third, unless you want to make the UI a differentiating factor for your product then any time you spend iterating on novel interfaces is time you could have been spending on your company's core competencies. See... I dunno, Seth Godin, basically any startup blogger?

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#115

Post by masfuerte »

nextts wrote: post #77
rich_sasha wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most expensive pieces of software around is a Bloomberg Terminal, with base price starting at 20k/yr/license, plus more for extra data. And the UI, when you first use it, is beyond clunky. It looks seriously like a piece of stone age technology, adapted from clay tablets. Even the styling is like 80s films about edgy hackers and their punch cards. Except when you talk to the grey hairs, you realize that UI…

I think to me that would be the appeal of Vim. VSCode implicitly promises this with its plugin approach. Using Ctrl Shift P for years is the sort of thing I like. One less thing in my way.

I'd never noticed that ctrl-shift-p was a thing. In gvim ctrl-p moves up a line but ctrl-shift-p seems to do page up. Do you know if this is documented anywhere?

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#116

Post by dacryn »

eviks wrote: post #65
rich_sasha wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most expensive pieces of software around is a Bloomberg Terminal, with base price starting at 20k/yr/license, plus more for extra data. And the UI, when you first use it, is beyond clunky. It looks seriously like a piece of stone age technology, adapted from clay tablets. Even the styling is like 80s films about edgy hackers and their punch cards. Except when you talk to the grey hairs, you realize that UI…

> you realize that UI has never, ever changed - it is backwards compatible back to, well, stone age of computers. It is quirky, but once you learn it, you're done for life True power users could customize to remove the quirks and also be set for life, but at a better level of ergonomics. Or they could even use the best customization from one of those gray beards who cared about ergonomics more ever back in the day An…

You fail to grasp the value of bloomberg terminal.

The UI has in fact, evolved, but it has never changed. For example, higher DPI screen sizes, the UI is now instrumented in a web browser, no longer the the old TUI. It is fast, it is familiar, it's the same, but it evolves, if that makes sense.

If you know how to use it in company A in decade 1980, you know how to use it in company B today. That doesn't mean it hasn't improved or improved ergonomics.

It's a beautiful piece of engineering that got the basics right. Power users add whatever they need to it, modular, but it's not like Vim or VSCode where you are basically useless without a large effort when moving into a blank new updated version, let alone things like the ribbon design vs the old design in office.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#117

Post by kccqzy »

hliyan wrote: post #29

To me, peak usability was 25 years ago, when most applications had a toolbar and a menu that followed a standard pattern. If you're a frequent, non-power-user, you use the toolbar (e.g. "insert row" button). If you're an infrequent non-power-user, you go through the menu (Insert > Row Above). If you're a power user, you remember the shortcuts indicated through underlined letters in menu labels (e.g. Alt, I, A). If yo…

The problem here is the fact that the expected cost of software has become zero. 25 years ago most productivity apps would charge money. There might be a free trial but you need to pay for it. These days most expect software to be free of charge. A lot of the regression in software quality and usability can be traced back to this.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#118

Post by dylan604 »

hliyan wrote: post #35
998244353 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This might be okay for consumer apps, but maddeningly, the same doctrine gets applied to enterprise applications as well. I've literally heard non-techie employees of a Fortune 100 company ask for their legacy green screen terminals back because the new, flashy SPA was slowing them down. Applying general design principles without taking actual use cases into account is the worst. A common one is putting heaps of wh…

Agreed. Most user experience work today are done by people who ironically have little experience as a user. E.g. they will design a table in Figma, make it look nice. They may even go so far as understand that this table will typically contain 2500 rows and introduce pagination and filtering by most commonly used attributes. But if they load some sample data into a functional mock system and simulate a typical user's…

> Most user experience work today are done by people who ironically have little experience as a user

So many upvotes for this. While the provided thing might technically work, if it is clunky for the users, the users will not like it. I understand those making the thing will probably never use the thing. The problem comes when those making do not listen to those using. There have been many times where I've made the thing, but then when I went to use the thing I wanted nasty things to happen to the person that made it. I've been in some very contentious UAT rounds where I was the user and the devs refused to listen to valid complaints.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#119

Post by wvbdmp »

seanwilson wrote: post #68
hliyan wrote: post #29

To me, peak usability was 25 years ago, when most applications had a toolbar and a menu that followed a standard pattern. If you're a frequent, non-power-user, you use the toolbar (e.g. "insert row" button). If you're an infrequent non-power-user, you go through the menu (Insert > Row Above). If you're a power user, you remember the shortcuts indicated through underlined letters in menu labels (e.g. Alt, I, A). If yo…

> To me, peak usability was 25 years ago, when most applications had a toolbar and a menu that followed a standard pattern. Some things were good, but there were lots of problems too like features hidden behind right-clicks, not knowing if you had to double or single click, being required to read help/manuals to find features, too much jargon and technical language, and overuse of modals. UIs have got incrementally b…

> Some things were good, but there were lots of problems too like features hidden behind right-clicks, not knowing if you had to double or single click, being required to read help/manuals to find features, too much jargon and technical language, and overuse of modals.

I dunno… all of these issues are still very prevalent. The one that probably disappeared the most is the right click context menu, which I would argue was actually great for discoverability. Personally, I lament its demise. Of course context menus still exist, but it used to be a pretty reliable universal convention.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#120

Post by patja »

Ensorceled wrote: post #82
kskjfjfkdkska wrote: post #60

> Common patterns—like password strength indicators—usually exist for good reasons. NIST does not recommend password strength indicators. Make sure the form is compatible with password managers. https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-4/sp800-63b.html#password

> Make sure the form is compatible with password managers. The number of sites that go out of their way to prevent password managers, well any "paste" mechanisms, is still annoying but are becoming fewer.

Bank account numbers for ACH payments seem to be the final frontier. As if asking me to type 16 numbers correctly is better than pasting it.
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