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Your website is not for you

websmith.studio

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Re: Your website is not for you

#161

Post by prerok »

shermantanktop wrote: post #111

The ones who treat a website as their personal taste vehicle are the designers! Over and over I see tiny illegible fonts and gray-on-gray buttons being defended by the designer who made it. Maybe I have bad taste - I’ve built enough websites to know that good design is hard and doesn’t come naturally to me. But the professionals seem to have a hard time with being dispassionate about their own ideas.

I think there was another comment among these that said it best: "graphics designers". The main conflict seems to arise between usability (UX) and the "view". It may look pretty but if it's unusable it's a showstopper.

Sorry for regurgitating what someone else posted but it really resonated with my experience.

Re: Your website is not for you

#164

Post by jeffhwang »

dgellow wrote: post #53

I fully reject the whole “the website isn’t art”, “the website isn’t about you”. That fees so myopic. A website is part of developing a brand identity. It is about expressing your values, while also providing information/a service (assuming we talk about companies). Art is about communicating feelings, emotions, a message, there is a clear overlap with a brand identity here

Agreed. As someone who has been in charge of business websites of for both Mag7 websites and for Silicon Valley startups, there can be a productive disagreement about what exactly user needs are. As well as how to balance business conversion / sales metrics vs the larger ability to communicate brand identity.

Meanwhile, my personal website pretty much only serves my own idiosyncratic interests!

Re: Your website is not for you

#165

Post by bsoles »

xyzelement wrote: post #28

The only problem with this analysis is that in practice a lot of the designers don't understand the customer and don't understand the business. Don't understand the market, at least compared to the founders or people who've been in the space for a long time. So there's a bit of a false confidence where the designers think they know what's really right because they did "scientific approach". But in reality the founder…

The "design thinking" BS led many UX designers to think that they can come into any project and design user interfaces without really understanding the field, the customers, nor the application.

I have seen this in my own organization where the UX organization assigns a UX person to a project on demand. They have no understanding of the particular application domain and yet they presume they can build good user interfaces because they practice design thinking. All the while ignoring technical experts on the team.

But domain experts and developers are also to blame since they cannot claim their turf successfully enough.

Re: Your website is not for you

#166

Post by compiler-guy »

bicepjai wrote: post #157

My personal website is absolutely for me and not anyone else :) It’s like saying the art I made is not for me !!!?

One of the disadvantages of the Hacker News policy to only use article headlines verbatim is that a bunch of context can get lost. This article is on a blog that deals with professional web design for businesses, and starts with that assumption about the readers.

Then hn comes and takes it out of that context.

Re: Your website is not for you

#167

Post by IAmBroom »

adampunk wrote: post #26
0123456789ABCDE wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

perhaps, before the thread derails into a bunch of comments like the parent, we should consider that the article is not a comment on what your side-projects look like, those obviously should look however you please. rather the comment is directed at folks who want both great UX, and for their taste to reflected on the website, and quite frankly: some of you have absolutely no sense of what usability affordances requi…

Counterpoint: that's also wrong and those who give up the idea of their website being for "them" (a person or group) end up making websites that are bad. Jakob's law is often taken as support for the opposite position, but if Google looked like search engines circa 1998, no one would have switched.

Google did, and we did. Google won the search engine war by having a far superior engine, not because they had cute art for the six letters of the company name (which came later).

Re: Your website is not for you

#168

Post by IAmBroom »

shevy-java wrote: post #69

> The website isn't for the founder, the marketing manager, or the board. It's for the person you've never met - the customer Actually - the websites I create, design and maintain, are ... primarily for me. I am a very critical user though, so I am also a great feedback person. I tell myself "you need to improve this". Then I either do so, or put it in a todo file that is rarely looked at lateron again. So I don't ag…

You seem to be responding to the title, not the article content. Your website is your own, and that's not what the article is addressing.

You don't have designers and governing boards; it's written about sites for bigger organizations.

Re: Your website is not for you

#169

Post by adampunk »

0123456789ABCDE wrote: post #120
adampunk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: that's also wrong and those who give up the idea of their website being for "them" (a person or group) end up making websites that are bad. Jakob's law is often taken as support for the opposite position, but if Google looked like search engines circa 1998, no one would have switched.

have you considered, in the specific example of google being different from the rest, that all the other services were _wrong,_ or their goals were different than google's?

I’m not sure what you’re arguing with.

GOOGLE did not look like the rest of the search engine engines on purpose. We agree completely. It looked very different and it operated in a very different way.

If instead, we designed GOOGLE like we designed website websites now, with Jakob’s law front of mind, what would have been created would have just been another entry in a forgettable list.

The argument is that user research will tell you when your customers want a faster horse. It will not tell you all that much else. If you want customers who want a faster horse or if what you need is to be told to make a faster horse—which is most websites— it works great.

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