Were em-dashes this popular before LLMs?
Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
141–150 of 190 posts
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
The funny thing is that a lot of those problems are known during development time, by the people who have to actually "use" the product at all times during development, a.k.a. the developers.
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 t…
The funny thing is that a lot of those problems are known during development time, by the people who have to actually "use" the product at all times during development, a.k.a. the developers.
Not sure I follow. The situations I've built appear fine during testing during development. I go to the UI, click the buttons, get the correct result. Test complete.
The type of thing I'm thinking about is when the user does that many many times in a day, but to get to the button that is on one part of the screen which is very inefficient compared to if the button was moved closer to something else so that the UX is improved. Sure, what the dev did "worked", but it might not feel clunky when you test it once or twice. That's the difference that drives most UXDev disagreements.
Dev: but it works
User: yes, but it sux using it. it can be better for us if change X, Y, Z
Dev: but it works. ticket closed
It doesn't matter if it works while everyone hates using it. I don't care what the devs think. If the user's request is reasonable, rational, and will improve the UX, stop fighting it. This situation is precisely my experience that happens when there's no designer.
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#144To 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…
I just watched a few minutes of someone using it, and I have a few observations.
- Uniform menus everywhere
- Every menu has an ID visible in the corner. Imagine how easy troubleshooting would be if you could just say, I'm on menu 4388 and I'm not getting the result I expect.
- Every selection has a number. Presumably you can type this in rather than mouse over to it?
- Every page has keywords you can string together for instant searching
- No transition animations
This is nice to see: a tool for getting things done, not for nudging the user in a desired direction to satisfy marketing goals.
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#145AI is not designing good? How? The tech bros hate artistic minded people. They hate design because it is the engine of growth and change. Tech bros like sameness and libraries. They love "design patterns". But change is inevitable and design is not in the colors, fonts, whitespace. Design is human centered practice for solving not only functional tasks but emotional. And for this there is no Tailwind, React, AI solut…
> Design is human centered practice for solving not only functional tasks but emotional
Having worked around design and UX people for a long time, I'd say there are plenty of design people who are practical and don't talk about emotional tasks.
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#1461qq
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#147The most obvious change that happens after hiring a graphic designer is that the app/website stops looking like shit, and adopts a pleasing color palette and set of fonts. There is real value in this, and the median graphic designer definitely chooses these better than the median engineer. But UX is a broader umbrella which encompasses interaction flows at the large end, and single function widgets at the small end.…
Or you know.. talk to users and understand their needs (discovery) then design solutions based off that understanding and iterate on designs with usability testing with said users until it feels like magic to them using it the first time, smooth and seamless flows across use cases with good copy and accessibility.
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
The funny thing is that a lot of those problems are known during development time, by the people who have to actually "use" the product at all times during development, a.k.a. the developers.
Not sure I follow. The situations I've built appear fine during testing during development. I go to the UI, click the buttons, get the correct result. Test complete. The type of thing I'm thinking about is when the user does that many many times in a day, but to get to the button that is on one part of the screen which is very inefficient compared to if the button was moved closer to something else so that the UX is…
I'm talking about bad designs. Grandparent mentions Figma, this is who I'm talking about.
Developers have to work on the app the whole day and they know when a design is bad for long term usage. Either by doing manual testing, or even when automating it.
UX people dictating the designs will rely on instinct even when developers complain that a design is inefficient. Or even for visual design things like excessive padding getting in the way of making the apple useable. IME, YMMV.
If you're talking about inexperienced/unemphatic developers being in charge of UX alone: well, yeah, that will happen too.
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#149[dead]
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
That is most likely what their iOS & macOS design language will be going forward: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/10/ios-19-visionos-redesig...
With that said, the design sins it commits are pretty standard in the age of minimalist/flat UI. It looks pretty similar to Apple's current design language, just with some stylistic tweaks.
Not defending it, as some of those design decisions drive me up a wall. Is this text a button or just an input field? Can I click this image or is it static? Which directions can I swipe? Does this grey text mean it's a disabled button or placeholder text on an input field?
I am not nostalgic for the blocky, grey, in-your-face design of classic UIs like Windows 98. But sacrificing functionality and discoverability on the alter of pretty design is, unironically, bad design.