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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

#121

Post by jayd16 »

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…

Ok well a lot of that UX depends on hover states and right clicks that don't exist for touch screens. Key bindings? What keys?

That's the major reason we dont have the same toolbars. We can be cynical about engagement and free software but try to make a mobile app the old way. You can't.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#122

Post by eviks »

dacryn wrote: post #116
eviks wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

It's the other way around, the value of that terminal is in the information, not whatever hated UI quirks it had been stuck with since its inception, yet people keep falling for that old logic "old+expensive = great".

> it's the same, but it evolves, if that makes sense.

it doesn't, these are the opposite.

> 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.

Neither does this: it would be just as trivial to select at company B "use config ergonomic_grey_beard_1980" and continue with all your knowledge, just without those quirks you hated in 1980 that led you to change the stable defaults to a better config.

> but it's not like Vim

And in some sense in the relevant UI area it's exactly like Vim, where many bad quirks in the default config are praised by the grey beards and new converts alike.

> moving into a blank new updated version

Why would you do that instead of using your old config???

> the ribbon design vs the old design

Neither is forcing a change like this the only alternative

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#123

Post by rchaud »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #106
rchaud wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an enormous difference between HCI and UX. HCI relates to computer usability for general use cases. A CAD program is there to help you get tasks done, not waste your time, so must follow general HCI principles. UX is watered down HCI that takes business considerations into account. Think about how Microsoft jams a Copilot button into everything, all the way down to the blinking cursor. That doesn't help users…

> The UX of Facebook is a huge mess, a never-ending, non-chronological scroll of dopamine slot machines. This is not really relevant to the discussion of the content of the post: "do what others are doing, do what your users are already used to doing" Whether Facebook's content is good or bad is not really relevant; the UX of FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, and almost every other social media app is remarkably similar in layo…

Yes, but not because of a self-proclaimed "law". The UX is similar across FB, Twitter and LinkedIN, because they all sell ads, and what you can charge for ads is reliant on how much time people are spending on the platform.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#124

Post by mbar84 »

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 definite UX improvement over the past 25 years have been command menus. In the most simple implementation, press Ctrl+P start typing to filter a list of commands down and hit enter.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#125

Post by whartung »

I’m hardly a UI, well, anything.

But I want to point out the application that is used at the Quest Diagnostics lab. The one they use to enter your demographic, lab info, etc. The daily driver for their legion of phlebotomists, at least here in So Cal.

One word. It’s fast. Oh man is it fast. Bunches of fields, bunches of dialog boxes, looks like a Windows back office application. Prints all of the vial tracking labels. These people are trained and know what is coming when.

But, it seems to be in a web browser tab. Perhaps they’re running a RDP tab to a nearby server running some Windows based desktop app, but, again, this app flies. I’ve not seen modern app this fast.

I’d love to know how they are pulling it off.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#126

Post by CharlieDigital »

rchaud wrote: post #123
CharlieDigital wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The UX of Facebook is a huge mess, a never-ending, non-chronological scroll of dopamine slot machines. This is not really relevant to the discussion of the content of the post: "do what others are doing, do what your users are already used to doing" Whether Facebook's content is good or bad is not really relevant; the UX of FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, and almost every other social media app is remarkably similar in layo…

Yes, but not because of a self-proclaimed "law". The UX is similar across FB, Twitter and LinkedIN, because they all sell ads, and what you can charge for ads is reliant on how much time people are spending on the platform.

Laws in these cases are never self proclaimed; they are simply made from observations. This is not a law in a legal term; it's a law because through observation, there is a universal truth to it.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#127

Post by gedy »

asoneth wrote: post #111
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…

> 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 rig…

Yeah this is a good reminder that technology rewrites do NOT need to rethink the UI. I've always favored updating the technology first to enable faster incremental UI changes afterwards.

I love my UX friends but they almost universally hop on tech updates to rethink everything, and then it muddies up the customer feedback on the rewrite. Was this a tech bug introduced? Or an annoying UX change? etc.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#128

Post by troupo »

loeber wrote: post #52
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…

I agree with this, so much so that I wrote a long essay about this Modern web design has completely lost the design idioms that so much thought went into during the desktop software wave of the 90s and early 2000s. This is a great loss for usability. https://loeber.substack.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-design

Not just web design. Design, period. Here's what Apple is producing these days: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1899392713323147633

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#129

Post by cpeterso »

gffrd wrote: post #25
CaffeineLD50 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A real user might be worse. A program is less flexible (maybe) and more consistent (definitely) than a meat space CBL. The goal is not realism but a kind of ready made "you must be this tall to ride the rollercoaster" threshold. Discovering edge cases with dodgy human users has its value, but that's a different value.

A real user will be worse … but that’s kinda the point. The most valuable thing you learn in usability/research is not if your experience works, but the way it’ll be misinterpreted, abused, and bent to do things it wasn’t designed to.

Enter "Drunk User Testing". Host a happy hour event and give some buzzed users some scenarios to test.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/an-open-bar-fo...

https://uxpamagazine.org/boozeability/

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#130

Post by rojcyk »

whstl wrote: post #90
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…

Reading about whitespace on tables infuriates me so much. At a previous job we had an actual good designer figure out what users wanted and she found out users wanted denser information. So she designed a more compact table. It was quite smart, used the whole screen, but still looked amazing and didn't feel cramped. Then my company released it as a library for the whole company to use and the first thing one of the p…

I worked on a couple of internal frameworks as a designer and thats exactly what happened to our frameworks.

Throwing away all the research and optimization out of the window for one unnecessary “we really need this” scenario.

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