Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

tibinotes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 190 posts

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#171

Post by wvbdmp »

seanwilson wrote: post #133
wvbdmp wrote: post #119

Earlier 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 know what you mean, but my point is, if you have a strong convention that right click

a) never actually runs anything, so you can’t accidentally break stuff

and

b) usually shows contextually relevant actions

That makes for great discoverability, actually. Discoverabilty is mostly a measure of how confidently one can dick around without causing accidents (and being able to undo them easily).

Your point about there being to indication whether something is clickable or not applies to left clicks just as well, and this also used to be less of a problem before everyone rolled their own, usually very flat, designs. You could teach someone basic principles and they’d be widely applicable. These days you’d have to start with a full lecture on the differences between web apps and “native” apps and natively packaged web apps…

I wonder if it took the shinier, less conventional UIs to get all these “non-tech” people to use computers in the first place. A dilemma, because they would benefit from boring conventions the most.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#172

Post by edelhans »

throwaway24124 wrote: post #96
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…

Well, it depends on the audience of your software. Bloomberg Terminal is awesome, but has a steep learning curve. Most people who learn to use it are learning it with the specific intention of finding a job where they are paid to know how to use the Bloomberg Terminal. I agree, the UI is awesome for that, but if your startup is an app to find a dog walker or something, the vast majority of your potential users are go…

Yeah but even if your app is the new Uber for dogs the goal should still be to let users accomplish their task as fast as possible and not some app engagement metric.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#173

Post by LoganDark »

Izkata wrote: post #160
LoganDark wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think it's even React itself that's the root cause the performance problems, it's using the data store badly (Redux or Mobx or even the new ones like Zustand and Valtio) that either causes components to rerender too often or causes too many components to rerender. 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 n…

> I don't think it's even React itself that's the root cause the performance problems, it's using the data store badly (Redux or Mobx or even the new ones like Zustand and Valtio) that either causes components to rerender too often or causes too many components to rerender.

Like I said, it's shoddy development practices. I've seen apps that use one of those mutable object libraries (not any of the ones you listed) and just pass the objects everywhere. Whole app re-render on any state update because of how all of the state is nested inside these mutable mega-variables held by the root of the component tree. I try to chip away at the innermost components and create little havens that use immutable state as they should, but it's going to take years to redo the whole app that way, especially since refactoring isn't a priority yet.

By the way, a cool trick if a component you're using does not use `React.memo` is to memoize the element, because if React sees the exact same (reference-equal) element as the last render, it will not re-render the corresponding component tree. (Element refers to the return type of JSX expressions.) Obviously, only do this if it actually doesn't need to re-render.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#174

Post by LoganDark »

seanwilson wrote: post #163
LoganDark wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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

I most commonly see and also appreciate being able to tap-hold on icon-only buttons to learn the text label that the icon represents. I can usually guess what most icons mean, but sometimes it's not entirely obvious.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#175

Post by CaffeineLD50 »

Tepix wrote: post #31
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.

More consistent? That's not a given with LLMs unless you set the temperature to 0.

You are right. LLMs are totally random and useless.

Thanks for playing.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#176

Post by Tepix »

CaffeineLD50 wrote: post #175
Tepix wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More consistent? That's not a given with LLMs unless you set the temperature to 0.

You are right. LLMs are totally random and useless. Thanks for playing.

You seem to disagree. Here's an interesting study where the researchers used an OpenAI-LLM-based tool to grade student papers and by grading them 10 times in a row, they got vastly different results:

https://rainermuehlhoff.de/en/fobizz-AI-grading-assistant-te...

Quote: "The results reveal significant shortcomings: The tool’s numerical grades and qualitative feedback are often random and do not improve even when its suggestions are incorporated."

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#177

Post by Suppafly »

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…

>To me, peak usability was 25 years ago, when most applications had a toolbar and a menu that followed a standard pattern.

I've done different sorts of tech support since grade school and people always ask me how I got so 'good at computers', I they never believe that actually reading the menus is 90% of it and that once you learn the common ways programs are arranged and some common shortcuts you pretty much know how to use all of them.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#178

Post by Suppafly »

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…

I worked for an insurance company for a while that was pushing their agents away from 'green screen' terminals to webapps that did most of the same stuff, the agents hated it because they had every step necessary to do quotes and such memorized and were way slower trying to navigate menus on the web.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#180

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

nextts wrote: post #169
ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't want to be overly specific, but consider difference between 10-25 and 30-130.

Remotely hired UXers get more competitive compensation, so my original estimation is wrong. But, there's far less of them than SWEs so they don't tend to raise the local pay mean as much.

Post reply on HN