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Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

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Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#31

Post by Tepix »

CaffeineLD50 wrote: post #20
potatoman22 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll have to use this, thanks for sharing. Isn't it problematic since Gemini isn't representative of a real user, though?

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.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#33

Post by caseyohara »

alphazard wrote: post #10

The 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.…

> It's very difficult to create good UX by design because evaluating the system by imagination is much harder than with an implementation.

This is precisely why it’s a tragedy that the roles in software development have become so compartmentalized. It wasn’t that long ago that the same person designing an interface was also responsible for developing it. Or that design and development were one and the same, part of the same process.

These days, many “UX designers”, “UI designers”, and “product designers” have never written a line of code. Some even have an allergic response to the very idea of coding. That’s fine, but naturally it means there’s a wide gap in understanding between design and implementation. This leads to the UI equivalent of the dreaded Architecture Astronaut[1]—so disconnected from the reality of how software works and is built that they design absurd interfaces that look great in Figma but fail miserably when put into practice.

In my experience, the closer you are to the implementation—and by this I mean the more involved you are in the actual coding—the tighter the feedback loop on the quality of the user experience. It affords the sanding and polishing required for a great UI with a great experience. Some of the very best interfaces that I’ve seen and used, both in terms of quality user experience and visual design, were designed and built by those rare engineers that happen to have outstanding intuition and taste for great design. The worst UIs I’ve used are from designers that don’t code handed over to engineers with no design taste.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_astronaut

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#34

Post by 998244353 »

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…

> 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.

Applying general design principles without taking actual use cases into account is the worst.

A common one is putting heaps of whitespace around each cells in a table. Visually appealing, sure. But unusable if I need to look at more than 8 rows at the same time.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#35

Post by hliyan »

998244353 wrote: post #34
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…

> 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. Applying general design principles without taking actual use cases into account is the worst. A common one is putting heaps of wh…

Agreed. Most user experience work today are done by people who ironically have little experience as a user. E.g. they will design a table in Figma, make it look nice. They may even go so far as understand that this table will typically contain 2500 rows and introduce pagination and filtering by most commonly used attributes. But if they load some sample data into a functional mock system and simulate a typical user's day (e.g. they have to wade through this table multiple times per hour, while on the phone with a customer), they will immediately realize the feel good factor of white spaces, pastel colours and high contrast icons are very low priority.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#36

Post by re-thc »

caseyohara wrote: post #33
alphazard wrote: post #10

The 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.…

> It's very difficult to create good UX by design because evaluating the system by imagination is much harder than with an implementation. This is precisely why it’s a tragedy that the roles in software development have become so compartmentalized. It wasn’t that long ago that the same person designing an interface was also responsible for developing it. Or that design and development were one and the same, part of t…

> These days, many “UX designers”, “UI designers”, and “product designers” have never written a line of code.

Same for some "architects". They just draw up random system designs that don't work for THEIR environment.

> This is precisely why it’s a tragedy that the roles in software development have become so compartmentalized.

The worse part of it all is it's not the software engineer's fault either (most of the time). HR, managers and others haven't improved over time and instead are enforcing non-software values on the engineers. It's all about ticking boxes. You get classified as a Go REST API backend engineer and somehow you can't touch React because that's not your thing.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#37

Post by sebastiennight »

dustbunny wrote: post #18

Where do startups typically get their branding done? I'm assuming the VCs usually refer their cohort to the same group of branding agencies? Who are the quick and dirty ones? Do they ever hire direct freelancers? Possibly to save money?

We got our branding guide done through a 99Designs contest. Over the last few years there has been an incredible increase in how many design entries you get per dollar on that platform.

It was definitely worth it, and then we redesigned the website, and now the app based on that branding guide. 10/10 would recommend.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#38

Post by sebastiennight »

stared wrote: post #7

I recommend focusing on general design principles and mindset. - Read "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman - once you understand what makes a good (or bad) door handle, you'll start seeing design patterns everywhere. - Read "The Art of Game Design" by Jesse Schell. It discusses how to create engaging experiences, and games are particularly unforgiving. While people might tolerate an annoying tax app becau…

Be warned: reading "The Design of Everyday Things" will make you incredibly frustrated at hotel doors, light switches in your house, kitchen appliances, and many other daily interactions with objects - once you realize that best practices to make them usable have existed for 40 years and designers still can't be arsed to make a restroom faucet you can understand on the first try.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#39

Post by mamcx »

dave_sid wrote: post #2

Doing something because all the big companies do it also leads to cargo cult mentality. You should know exactly why you are building every little part of your system. “Oh Google used a really annoying captcha on that page, I better do that as Google knows best”. Have some confidence and don’t assume that other bigger companies are smarter than you are, think about what you can improve. Most of what Google have to off…

> Doing something because all the big companies

I learned this after many attempts early in my career to copy what the MS conferences were talking about.

The thing is that what a big company do can be good (in fact MS was fine back then!) but are problems for big companies, and have issues that you don't need to copy, worse: copy without knowing. For example, microservices, horizontal scalability, massive telemetry to cover all, etc are problems yo don't want to get.

What it works much better, is to copy a small/medium player that is very well regarded. Like for example, think in panic, vlc, etc. Small/medium players that have good reputation need make more effort than big players, and are on top of the good things by necessity.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#40

Post by sebastiennight »

From 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 flesh out into a clickable prototype, then workshop again, then final prototype, can come out within a $5k-$10k budget.

That's 100% worth cutting $5k from your front-end dev budget, and will definitely translate into way more than $5k in user retention gains within the first year.

This is what we did before coding the MVP, and we're doing it again now (at Seed stage) before shipping our biggest upgrade to the product.

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