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Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
181–190 of 190 posts
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#182The 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.…
> and adopts a pleasing color palette and set of fonts
This is an unfortunate side-effect of confusing apps with web pages. No one hired a designer to pick the fonts and colors for Windows 95, because that was up to the OS ad user.
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
> no ... rewrites in Svelte or whatever The vast majority of the terminal interface has been rewritten more than once, but the UX framework team does a great job mimicking the prior look and feel each time. Though if you know what to look for you can spot functions that haven't been updated in a while, and even a handful that have remained unchanged since the beginning. > no refreshed new looks or skins Basically rig…
Yeah this is a good reminder that technology rewrites do NOT need to rethink the UI. I've always favored updating the technology first to enable faster incremental UI changes afterwards. I love my UX friends but they almost universally hop on tech updates to rethink everything, and then it muddies up the customer feedback on the rewrite. Was this a tech bug introduced? Or an annoying UX change? etc.
When I taught UX graduate students we certainly tried to instill in junior designers that their chief responsibility is to their end-users. And where it doesn't negatively influence their users their secondary responsibility to the business. Coming it at a distant third is their own sensibilities and satisfaction. Putting business needs above your users makes you a black-hat designer peddling dark patterns. Putting personal sensibilities over either makes you a digital artist -- not inherently a bad thing but also not what most companies are looking for.
Frankly many junior developers seem to have missed this lesson as well. I've seen countless rewrites for personal satisfaction or learning rather than concrete end-user or business goals.
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could still do this in the GUIs of 25 years ago, you'd just memorize the keyboard shortcuts and use them. They'd buffer so you could type a series of operations faster than the screen could render them, and basically every function was accessible from the keyboard. But the GUI had the advantage of discoverability - if you didn't know the keyboard shortcut, you could just work your way through the menus and find i…
While possible, the uptake/usage is very low once it requires lots of CTRL / ALT / CMD button sequences. Take something like Excel, which many users use daily for work, but most people likely only use less than a dozen common keyboard shortcuts. Practically nobody navigates the ribbon with their keyboard. I'm in a role of Finance / Excel "super user" in my profession. There's a subculture of keyboard shortcut enthusi…
> Take something like Excel, which many users use daily for work, but most people likely only use less than a dozen common keyboard shortcuts. Practically nobody navigates the ribbon with their keyboard.
Partly, this is because:
- Excel has high latency to enter keyboard-access mode. Type too fast, and it misses keystrokes.
- Excel's ribbon keystrokes change depending on size of the window, and how much stuff has been added to the ribbon by VBA in the workbook, an add-in, or the user
- To a lesser extent: some of Excel's ribbon keystrokes "make sense", but some bear no relation the the target item even if a "sensible" keystroke is not already claimed by another target.
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#185To 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 definite UX improvement over the past 25 years have been command menus. In the most simple implementation, press Ctrl+P start typing to filter a list of commands down and hit enter.
If only this worked properly in Excel! It has them, via Alt-Q, but there's always a delay before it activates. And you can't just press Enter to accept the first result, like most type-ahead command menus; no, you have to arrow down once, or Excel stares blankly at you.
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#186From experience I will say that you can hire a UX designer even if bootstrapped and low on cash, and that it's a very valuable investment. Just don't hire them full time as the article seems to suggest is the only choice. Getting a small firm to go through a design sprint with you with, e.g. designing 3 concepts, letting you run a couple of UX workshops with your potential users, then picking one of the options to fl…
Can you share the firm you worked with?
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#187I have a different approach. I look for a theme on Theme Forrest which has most of the layouts and components I think I'll need and I lean on those VERY heavily. And for logos I use icons from Font Awesome or Bootstrap. Most of the time the project doesn't take off and when it does I can hire a designer. Some examples of both a theme based app using an icon as the logo :). [1] https://getpreppy.app [2] https://withla…
As a non designer this is the same approach I take
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#188To 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. 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. UIs have got incrementally b…
> UIs have got incrementally better ... e.g. right-clicking and double-clicking is avoided
This is like saying, that cutting someone's foot, makes him a better man.
Today UIs are crap. Why is the scrollbar so small and hidden ? What is all the unusable space in Office's 365 title bar ? Why gray on gray ?
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#189To 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 definite UX improvement over the past 25 years have been command menus. In the most simple implementation, press Ctrl+P start typing to filter a list of commands down and hit enter.
> press Ctrl+P
... and open the Print dialog. /s
Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
#190From experience I will say that you can hire a UX designer even if bootstrapped and low on cash, and that it's a very valuable investment. Just don't hire them full time as the article seems to suggest is the only choice. Getting a small firm to go through a design sprint with you with, e.g. designing 3 concepts, letting you run a couple of UX workshops with your potential users, then picking one of the options to fl…
Can you share the firm you worked with?
Sure. Email is in my profile, shoot me a message and I'll put you in touch