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Your website is not for you
181–190 of 207 posts
Re: Your website is not for you
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When the founders say they want the picture bigger and the logo a bit more purple and can we add underlines to all the menu items and also bold them Simple: they’re trying to give you the solution , and it’s your duty as the responsible designer/developer to find out what problem they see. Here’s a nice set of questions I’m using (from Managing projects, people, and yourself [1] by Nick Toverovskiy): 1. What did yo…
My problem with most of these books is they are indirectly trying to solve the real problem. The problem that IME HN is allergic to discussing. Power Dynamics. The reason the CEO is nitpicking your job is because he is not a good CEO and doesn't know his place or how to do his job. Almost all these books are about an indirect way of dealing with the fact that, this person is a ID10T and you have to deal with them bec…
We do it like that with everything. If you consider yourself an artist it is quite simple to say you cant put your name on it if anything changes. You can also explain what you just wrote: Youve hired me, trust me to do it and focus on your tasks. Or: we will be different from otters but in a limited number of ways and your suggestions dont offer enough roi to make the cut.
Re: Your website is not for you
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. That’s the point. You’re in a conversation with your customers, their website interactions is your opportunity to develop your identity/brand. The way you yourself (assuming you’re the founder for example) feel about it does matter quite a lot
This is how your company goes broke. There was a company, Amie, that had this [0] as their landing page initially, without the /art path. Guess what, visitors didn't convert, and then the company redid their landing page [1] to actually explain and convert customers. They literally host their prior landing page as "art" because it was so terrible at acquiring customers. [0] https://amie.so/art [1] https://amie.so
They had a "normal" page before the art one for the longest time according to my memory but confirmed by web archive.
Also: the current website is for a different product altogether. They pivoted.
Attributing low conversion rate to the style of the page isn't really fair when it was apparently a last attempt at attracting customers for an idea that was eventually abandoned.
Re: Your website is not for you
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
This, so much. I'm the IT Director of a medium sized (for our industry) company. Some years ago I worked with an amazing free-lance developer, and our then-director of marketing, to build a custom website that we were pretty proud of. A year ago our new marketing director paid mid-five figures to move to one of the site-builder services because 1.) the old CMS back-end to update content was "too technical", and the h…
> I expect next go-around they'll want to pay some big design agency for a custom site; it'll probably be six figures. I don't know how I should approach that discussion. Any ideas? Keep your ear to the ground and when you start to hear rumblings of this happening, pay a skilled freelancer to update the old website (or just build a new one if its easier) to fit the new marketing director's taste. Solve marketing's pr…
Yeah, that's the obvious thing to do. My fear is that we (more directly: I) have burned trust. After all, they moved us away from an internal solution because marketing didn't like it; how can I persuade them that a new internal solution wouldn't be going backwards?
You'll have to trust me: from a customer-facing POV the old site was miles better than the new; it's only from an "Owner"-facing POV that the new one is preferable.
Um, I guess that hints at the answer: any new proposal has to start with their (Marketing's) experience of the product - flatter them to the max. This probably should start with my being a little more-attuned to their specific frustrations with their new solution. Hmmm.
Thanks for thinking this through with me, HN. Would welcome any other advice.
Re: Your website is not for you
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
A bad designer can design a good-looking password form. A mediocre designer anticipates that they need to design for the case where the passwords don't match. A great designer can figure out that this particular product should actually be using magic links and not passwords.
> A great designer can figure out that this particular product should actually be using magic links and not passwords. If your designers are needing to generate input on technical issues like this, your product is already in trouble.
If your designers are only picking colors, fonts, and spacing then you don't have designers, you have software art directors.
Re: Your website is not for you
#186The 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…
Another pretty bad trend I see is designers who don't make pragmatic tradeoffs for the underlying technology. Not incorporating reusable components, not considering rendering times, not considering the design language already established. Sometimes designers decide they know better and that usually rubs me the wrong way.
Worse still are designers who don't use established patterns, not just within the company, but like throughout the web. They want to make something truly unique that would completely ostracize the user, not to mention make it waaaay more time-consuming to develop. Get a grip, this isn't your art thesis, its a business.
Re: Your website is not for you
#187The 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…
Replying to my own post because it's too late to edit. This post has clearly struck a nerve as I think it's my most upvoted post on HN ever. Behind this post is 3 companies worth of experience working with great designers (really, UXers) who vehemently advocate on behalf of the user but don't realize their own limitations to understand that user (and to therefore tone down the advocacy accordingly.) This is particula…
Yea I mean the first reaction I had to the blog was "yes, but have you met the same designers I have?" And to be clear I've worked with great designers who understood their limitations and blind spots, but its pretty common to see ones who charge ahead and ignore valuable developer feedback.
Re: Your website is not for you
#188The 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 inter…
Mockups in Gimp are great. Then can start with everything wrong, get input and make lots of versions.
Thinking about it, we should probably have some tool to make pictures behave like websites for demos.
Re: Your website is not for you
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
And when the CEO says "Hey, we really need to make our contact information more visible because I get a lot of customer reports that they can't figure out how to contact us", sure. When the founders say they want the picture bigger and the logo a bit more purple and can we add underlines to all the menu items and also bold them, probably not. Which one is more common?
> When the founders say they want the picture bigger and the logo a bit more purple and can we add underlines to all the menu items and also bold them Simple: they’re trying to give you the solution , and it’s your duty as the responsible designer/developer to find out what problem they see. Here’s a nice set of questions I’m using (from Managing projects, people, and yourself [1] by Nick Toverovskiy): 1. What did yo…
> it’s your duty as the responsible designer/developer to find out what problem they see.
I tried with wildly varying degrees of success to impress this on my fellow developers for decades. In every case it was an utterly new and foreign idea to them, including those who had actually studied computer science at degree level.
Re: Your website is not for you
#190This doesn't even touch the entire resume-driven development issue.
The vast majority of all websites today, are designed in such a way as to tout the resumes of all the people responsible for the site with all the latest buzzwords. Content hidden under drop-down menus noone cares about and which makes things very hard to find, pointless animation here and there, pointless custom zoom logic that doesn't work properly on the big screens, all the latest frameworks to display a few tables of text, progressive loading and pagination for the simplest of data (like the banking transactions of a consumer credit card) that in the old days could have simply been displayed on a single page etc.