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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

#161

Post by msy »

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…

It's not just about 'UX backward compatibility', it's the epitome of an expert user interface. If you don't know what you're doing it's near unusable but once you've mastered it the speed at which you can operate is incomparable to 'normal' software. It's also one of the few examples of this outside of software engineering tools.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#162

Post by rglover »

Highly recommend Ryan Singer's (original Basecamp designer) work. His blog [1] is filled with great stuff. In particular this [2] post has given me over a decade of value re: designing UI and UX flows.

[1] https://ryansinger.co

[2] https://www.ryansinger.co/thinking-of-interfaces-as-sets-of-...

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#163

Post by seanwilson »

LoganDark wrote: post #152
seanwilson wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> right-click (and long tap on mobile) is super undiscoverable because there's no indication or hint it'll do anything. 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.

> tap-holding on any control to show a description of what it is.

Hmm, haven't seen this. Where do you need that? What kind of description that wouldn't be obvious from looking at the control?

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#164

Post by blendo »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #97

That was a lot of words to say "Jakob's Law"[0] "Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know." "1. Users will transfer expectations they have built around one familiar product to another that appears similar." "2. By leveraging existing mental models, we can create superior user experiences in which the users can f…

I knew it as “The principle of least astonishment”.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#165

Post by blendo »

nsxwolf wrote: post #11
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…

My favorite cargo cult thing today is that when you’re logged out you can’t find the login link anymore, just “Sign up”.

Text entry fields that don’t look like text entry fields.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#166

Post by nbzso »

robertlagrant wrote: post #145
nbzso wrote: post #138

AI 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.

So they are missing a lot. And this is the core of the problem. Emotions are practical. They are a part of human experience. You cannot approach design process as a framework documentation or recipe. Moving with current trends of double diamonds or whatever tools are fashionable. You have to be a generalist first and tap not only to the tech stack or quantitive approach, but also into a psychology and culture.

>Emotions are inseparable from how we humans think, choose, and act. In Emotional Design, cognitive scientist Don Norman shows how the principles of human psychology apply to the invention and design of new technologies and products.

https://shorturl.at/EKhRu

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#167

Post by presentation »

Surviving without a designer? More life thriving without one.

Honestly I think many startups at an early stage don’t need designers at all and they just want to look trendy (which admittedly is critical for consumer-focused companies that live and die on becoming trendy, but that’s not what I do).

The best designer for an early stage startup these days is someone with not awful visual/UX taste (no need for a specialist or a visual prodigy; most teams I’ve met have at least somebody who isn’t hopeless in this respect); but with a strong understanding of their target users and what they’re familiar with, so you can just copy prior art as is relevant. Much better than taking a designer who knows nothing about the space and needing to transfer your learned experience into their brain somehow.

Most startups aren’t doing anything truly novel from a UI standpoint so why reinvent the wheel? Designers become more useful when you stop having strong communication and trust in your team since it just got too big for that.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#168

Post by pkphilip »

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…

True. The UI of the applications from the late 90s to the early 2000s was way better than it is now - especially when you compare it to what is there in the web apps now.

Besides keyboard shortcuts, the following capabilities haven't really been implemented in web apps:

- Context menus

- Macros and the ability to record macros and create your own shortcuts to these macros.

- Terminal prompts built into applications such as in Autodesk - in some senses similar to the REPL in Clojure but built into the application

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#169

Post by nextts »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #85
nextts wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5-10x? Are you sure?

I might be exaggerating, but I know how much I and my coder friends earn. Western companies hire much more engineers and adjacents than designers. Consequently, for designers, the income is much closer to a local median. As my perspective is one of a person currently living outside the US or western Europe, I see a huge disparity between pay grades.

For example I reckon in my country say I'm on 150k TC as a senior eng and a senior designer may be on 75k. Using USD conversion. So 2x may be normal. 10x would make me probably in the top 100 highest paid devs in the country except those who got lucky with share comp or own a chunk of the biz.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#170

Post by troupo »

dlivingston wrote: post #150
troupo wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But sacrificing functionality and discoverability on the alter of pretty design is, unironically, bad design.

The irony is that it's not even pretty a lot of the time :)

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