This issue can affect even off-the-shelf software. Software designed to be used by company employess, but that has to be sold to upper management, prioritizes selling to upper management (e.g. features that face them) over usability by the employees. That can be baked right in; like it is assumed that the decision makers will be assuming that it's for them, and so it is designed accordingly.
Your website is not for you
191–200 of 207 posts
Re: Your website is not for you
#192The 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…
I'm struck by the assuredness of the responses. People seem to really dislike their designers—their low in the hierarchy, often junior colleagues who typically aren't in the meetings with the execs, the leaders, or whoever else has chosen the priorities. There's a reason the designers don't know "what's really right." There's a reason they're grasping to find or do research to inform themselves. You know, besides the part, where they're being asked to do that user research, often by their PMs and leaders. There's a weird amount of scapegoating here.
It's been my experience that leaders have rarely had enough of a vision to share, but tell the team to get started anyway. Someone has to suss that out—if not the leaders, then the PM except that the PM can skirt with vague requirements. The designs are the first place where all the ideas (many contradicting, many poorly thought out) hit a little reality. When the ideas that looked good amorphously in the head don't look good on screen, it's the design and not the requirements.
There's an insinuation in some of the comments that the projects (the leaders) are starting with a clear vision and design is muddying it up. I mean there are plenty of bad designers, but most companies have a broken product development process (they mostly all use the same one, despite different products, different team makeups, different leader strengths/weaknesses, etc.). Why are companies still hiring designers? Why is design a step in the process at all? I agree confusing designs keep coming out—there are so many enshittified products. It's design theater, but for who? Design is downstream not upstream.
Re: Your website is not for you
#193Actually, I can see why this blogs and the agency was created after reading their FAQs (preferred Astro and Next.js). But note that, there are multiple WebSmith site which can caught new clients to be confused.
Re: Your website is not for you
#194Why oh why do you use AI to write articles?
‘This is the bit that gets lost.’ as a start of the paragraph, and then the very next sentence parroting the chapters title. 3 sentences for 0 new information and this pattern is overused to death.
Don’t you people read what you publish? So disrespectful
Re: Your website is not for you
#195Solo founders typically spend so much time building an app completely invested in. They start neglecting the UX (marketing as well) and then they wonder why the app is not successful.
I would definitely suggest sending the beta beta version to friends and family before investing 90% more time on it.
Re: Your website is not for you
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also very often don’t understand what’s easy and what’s hard to implement, what’s a real priority vs a nice to have, and have extremely strong opinions against off-the-shelf components and prefer building everything from scratch. Also: The lesson of “don’t rewrite” from Joel Spolsky seems internalized in the minds of every developer, but "rewriting from scratch" is basically how designers operate by default. Mos…
really good observation, and it's interesting what will happen when implementation gets cheaper - designers will get overwhelmed with too many things to review now, probably
Good point. But TBH I was already seeing it, even in the pre-AI landscape.
Bad designers are a huge bottleneck and terrible gatekeepers of information, delaying the work even before the development starts, during and after. I saw this a lot in high-performance teams that had bad designers, but AI is making it even more clear now.
Good designers, on the other hand, know how to define standards and components, and have been empowering teams for quite some time. But of course this means there's less micromanagement and less reliance on Figma for every single screen.
What AI has really changed IMO is that there's no need for designers to ask developers to ask for micro-changes that take longer to explain than to ask an AI to do.
...but even that was already possible and extremely fast by simply having a designer pair with a developer and ask for changes on the fly.
IMO communication skills, organization and collaboration is what makes or breaks it, regardless of AI or not.
Re: Your website is not for you
#197Ego of founders will tell you that they are actually the experts since they are understanding the company better than anyone. The problem is that it's not a reality but just an ego.
You've actually described exactly the same problem that we've mentioned in our expectations as a design studio: https://klad.design/expectations
Re: Your website is not for you
#198Corporate bullcrap. Do your art, do what you believe in. Don't do it for "the company to make money." The company doesn't need to exist in and of itself. When you start making decisions that way, what is the point? So you can just say "I built a thing that conformed enough to the lowest common denominators of society to make a buck"?
Re: Your website is not for you
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, there’s a hell of a lot more false confidence among people who think they can evaluate the merits of a design than designers that do major interface projects not knowing the purpose of what they’re doing. And there are different kinds of designers out there. If you hire a database genius that only has done serious, involved database work, and then add a bunch of front-end web dev work to their tasks because the…
> There’s a big long clear approach to Dunning-Kreuger’s Mt. Stupid with dev work. Is it really that clear? Or do we just think so because most of us here are devs, while everyone else is thinking “Wow what happened? That codebase was great until suddenly it wasn’t.”
Yes it’s really that clear. The moment non-technical people see code syntax or hear technical jargon, they instantly nope out. That’s why people ask their developer friends and family to fix their computers — they don’t know the difference. It’s all just ‘tech’ to them. It’s also why people toil away at bonkers “no-code” machinations that would have been far simpler with a little more tech knowledge… it’s very intimidating to outsiders. OTOH, far fewer people even know what problems designers are meant to solve, let alone judge the solution, but many think ‘well I have good taste and I’ve worked with designers before’ and confidently wield their broken ideas based on false assumptions.
Re: Your website is not for you
#200business incentives > user experience
in my experience large corpos will always prioritise business incentives over a happy customer even when you make it blindingly obvious that a happy customer is actually better for their bottom line