Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pad…
Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
151–160 of 190 posts
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Right-click is fine for power users and professional tools if there isn't a better alternative, but right-click (and long tap on mobile) is super undiscoverable because there's no indication or hint it'll do anything. Whenever I help non-tech friends with software problems, I'm always reminded most people don't feel comfortable hunting around for functionality and for sure don't try right-clicking things on the chanc…
I really miss the days where it was common for tap-holding on any control to show a description of what it is. It may still be common in certain Android apps but I haven't seen it or anything like it on iOS.
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#153> Tools like ChatGPT can highlight UX issues you might miss. It’s a quick sanity check—not perfect, but better than guessing.
> Tools like ChatGPT can highlight UX issues you might miss. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than guessing. Some prompts to try:
Was this an intentional joke?
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pad…
TFA is about not having a designer. If you have a bad designer, then fix that glitch.
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is it exactly about React specifically (as apposed to Vue, HTML) that makes it flawed from a design perspective? I used to design and develop with Flash (which I very much miss) and while it was amazing for things like games, digital signage, elearning, etc, there is no way I could develop in Flash the products with the kind of complexity/responsiveness/sophistication of the web apps I am building now. Designing…
> What is it exactly about React specifically (as apposed to Vue, HTML) that makes it flawed from a design perspective? I'd say it's not React (not parent poster). I mean React might not be the best, but it's the least of the current problems. React is the most widely used. You're bound to attract all sorts of people. Poor code is poor code. You'd hire React developers because it is the easiest to hire. It doesn't ma…
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#156The 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.…
> It's very difficult to create good UX by design because evaluating the system by imagination is much harder than with an implementation. This is precisely why it’s a tragedy that the roles in software development have become so compartmentalized. It wasn’t that long ago that the same person designing an interface was also responsible for developing it. Or that design and development were one and the same, part of t…
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
”Modern ux” can be a very political term on HN. Yes, uxers have to balance business and user needs. That is the power dynamic of business we live in, it’s not typically the driving force of actual uxers themselves. At the core the ethos of the human centered design (HCD) is being an advocate for the needs of actual users. Being seen as the ”enemy” on HN feels demoralizing, as a person that sits on both sides of the f…
> uxers have to balance business and user needs. What does this mean? It seems that compromising the UX for a "business need" is just lazy user experience design.
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#158Earlier 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 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…
I can confirm that those numeric IDs help A LOT in troubleshooting and documentation. And not only that: those IDs are frequently and naturally used by the users themselves when communicating between them. Needless to say, they also use the IDs to navigate the system, only touching the menus when they have to use some infrequent function.
I always mention this "case study" to UX folks who insist to dumb users down with childish interfaces.
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#159To 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…
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What is it exactly about React specifically (as apposed to Vue, HTML) that makes it flawed from a design perspective? I'd say it's not React (not parent poster). I mean React might not be the best, but it's the least of the current problems. React is the most widely used. You're bound to attract all sorts of people. Poor code is poor code. You'd hire React developers because it is the easiest to hire. It doesn't ma…
There's nothing really fundamentally wrong with React that makes it a terrible idea that always results in poor performance. It's shoddy development practices that can make for a bad app that uses React. If you use React well though, it's not like React makes it particularly difficult to reach a good level of performance. I typically find that React makes it easier for me to make a well-performing app, but that's jus…
Having been bitten by this a few times, I'm paying a lot more attention to how my team uses it in the React app we're building from scratch right now, keeping an eye of how it's used and looking for problems before they become noticeable. I am, for example, inverting one of the common practices which I found was a cause of these performance problems:
"Atomic Design" with React splits components into different types - Atom, Molecule, Organism, Section/Template, Page. Each type of component is mainly composed of the smaller ones. It's generally suggested that Atoms and Molecules should be functional style and reusable, so not connected to the data store at all. Instead, Organism and up are the ones that manipulate data and pass things down into Molecules and Atoms to render. The problem here is that any update that triggers an Organism to rerender will also rerender all the Atoms and Molecules in it, even the ones that don't actually need to update (in the class-based component days we had shouldComponentUpdate() to avoid this, nowadays we have useMemo()/React.memo - neither of which we used with any consistency because of the extra effort).
Instead, while we do have a company-wide library of Atom-like elements we're using, the Atoms and Molecules inside the app are "smart" - they take a prop or two for configuration, then use that in combination with the data store to handle the data manipulation directly. Organism-level components then don't do any data wrangling and are just laying out what Molecules go where. This means when manipulating a Molecule, only that Molecule and any others looking at the same data need to rerender. The Organism and other Molecules in the same Organism are completely unaffected, not even trying to rerender and no need for React.memo to prevent it.
(Aside, to avoid confusion in the current app I haven't introduced the Atom/Molecule/Organism naming convention, and am instead using more semantic app-specific names for organizing components)
We still have a ways to go but we've already implemented the specific part I expected to cause the most problems here, and so far it's been great, the latency is so low it doesn't feel like a React app in the way I've come to expect, and there's much less manual manipulation of the data in the components themselves.