Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

Tailwind + daisyui can get you pretty far. My thinking is, if your start up takes off a real designer can remove all of the daisyui stuff and re-design with only tailwind.

I’m a UX designer and developer at a healthcare fintech startup. We do all our B2C communication design and product UX/UI design in-house with a small team.

But for our B2B site…I can’t name names…one of our investors did refer us to a well-established design agency who does small and medium-scale enterprise branding and marketing. And they did great work. So yes, there are a few ringer VC design agencies out there.

A real user will be worse … but that’s kinda the point.

The most valuable thing you learn in usability/research is not if your experience works, but the way it’ll be misinterpreted, abused, and bent to do things it wasn’t designed to.

Big companies aren’t usually that good at design (with some notable exceptions like Apple) because they don’t really have to be. They don’t need to impress anyone or prove their credibility, and they almost by definition have a product that people have a strong need or desire for, otherwise they wouldn’t be a big company.

When you have that, it probably doesn’t make much difference if you add some extra friction to your sign up flows or your UI is a bit janky.

When you’re the new guy who no one has heard of: that’s when you need design. You need to catch people’s attention, win their trust, and make it as easy as possible for them to get to the aha moment, because any minor inconvenience can be an excuse to close the tab of yet another random app and move on.

All that to say, startups often lean heavily on design to stand out from the crowd, so if I’m looking for good design and UX to emulate, I look for startups that are still small but gaining in popularity, whether bootstrapped or seed/series A. That’s typically where you find the best practices being implemented to a high bar. Once they get too successful, complacency and other priorities start to kick in and they are no longer the best examples to follow.

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 you want to change settings, you open the settings dialog (Tools > Settings), and it as tabs like "General", "Fonts and colors" etc.

Most people were a lot less computer literate back then, but they were able to use most applications with little help. If they really needed help, the help system was built into the application.

The goal back then was to have the user get the work done as efficiently as possible, in effect, minimizing the time the user pends on the application. Modern UX doctrine aims for the opposite goal -- to keep people "engaged" as much as possible. This might be okay for consumer apps, but maddeningly, the same doctrine gets applied to enterprise applications as well. I've literally heard non-techie employees of a Fortune 100 company ask for their legacy green screen terminals back because the new, flashy SPA was slowing them down.