Our CEO doesn't know what UX is and tried to get a marketing email designer to rebuild our whole tool. he figured the kid knows photoshop so he must know best.
What you should know as a founder of a software company
41–50 of 113 posts
Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do startups exist without customers paying them to solve a problem? From convincing investors that the problem exists? It sounds like the investors are the real customers and a narrative is the product they produce.
Some startups do very well. Uber, Lyft, Square Cash/Venmo, Yelp, those really do solve problems many of us have/had. Then a few tech startups doing analytics I had some experience with, probably overpromised (?? perhaps it was my fault) what their engine could do. Requests are often in backlog and can take many months to roll out, which by then contract renewal is up.
I don't quite understand why Yelp's on that list — do you mind elaborating?
Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#43> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…
Yes and no. The UX -is- part of the sell. You can sell the implementers on features, but to sell to a business (especially a traditional risk averse enterprise), you have to wow non-technical people. To do that, having an amazing UX for the features the non-technical people care about goes hand in hand with a sales pitch ("Look at how beautiful those charts and graphs are. You can really visualize the data to make be…
> ("Look at how beautiful those charts and graphs are. You can really visualize the data to make better decisions!")
That's one of my pet peeves. This literally is goes in the opposite direction most of the time - the prettier the graphs presented, the more useless they are. They show less, take more space, omit units, scales, or well... even useful data. Not to mention connecting things that should not be connected, or drawing areas where they shouldn't be, etc.
It's almost like if some people wanted to screw over their customers on purpose. But, I guess, it's more of people who don't know what they're doing selling things to people who don't know how to use them.
Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some startups do very well. Uber, Lyft, Square Cash/Venmo, Yelp, those really do solve problems many of us have/had. Then a few tech startups doing analytics I had some experience with, probably overpromised (?? perhaps it was my fault) what their engine could do. Requests are often in backlog and can take many months to roll out, which by then contract renewal is up.
I don't quite understand why Yelp's on that list — do you mind elaborating?
Sure. This is my view. I want to know nearby resturants and their reviews. I want see photos of the dishes. I want to see the decor. I want to see discounts if any. I want to see open hours. I want to search based on location, cusine, pricing etc. i know Google does this now, but Yelp was the first to make all the above well in one place. Google doesn’t have an app dedicated at all, just search. Yelp solved my problems. I think you can agree with me you would hear “let’s yelp it/check on yelp” when someone looks for resturants. I also use Yelp beyond just resturants. I was looking for a new dentist and I found him on Yelp after some reviews online. I got to see the good reviews and photos of his office. I was lucky those reviews were real. If I were new to a city I might check out Yelp and TripAdvisor for some reviews and recommenations.
Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#45How many TechCrunch articles can you find where an acquiring company says "the software we're buying doesn't really work, but it sure looks good!"? I just left a job where the founder (who didn't have any software background) deeply ingrained himself with this philosophy and wound making life a living hell for engineering. While building a full-stack prototype, we slapped bootstrap 4 on the front end because who has…
It keeps on puzzling me why don't engineers ever speak up. Like "Hey, man, I understand the old design sucks and you want to make it better, but editing things directly would only make the delays bigger. How about you take a few screenshots of the product, photoshop it the way you would like it to look and then we, as a technical team, will use our best expertise to make it look this way without breaking everything i…
Because "shut up or find yourself another job".
I thought this too until recently -- got fired after trying to protect my employer from a toxic exec.
There are some that do not accept anything but yesmans or silent codemonkeys. It sucks but it pays. If you are not willing to lose your position, just let it go.
Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#46How many TechCrunch articles can you find where an acquiring company says "the software we're buying doesn't really work, but it sure looks good!"? I just left a job where the founder (who didn't have any software background) deeply ingrained himself with this philosophy and wound making life a living hell for engineering. While building a full-stack prototype, we slapped bootstrap 4 on the front end because who has…
Where I write code we use git hooks to run linting and unit tests on pre-commit and integration tests on pre-push, and anyone using --no-verify gets a stern talking to. No one gets code in to the repo if it breaks the tests.
I'm still working on a way to stop commits that drop the coverage below a threshold so even new code can't be added if it isn't tested.
Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#47Founder here. That list is a lot of cart before a horse. You could master all those points and still not have a company on your hands.
#1: Solve an important enough pain point that companies or consumers will pay you for it.
Sorry it's not more catchy.
Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#48That was a really great article. Here's a few notes from my experience with FormAPI.io:
> One of the best ways to do it is to watch people interacting with your prototypes without giving them any hints.
This is so true. My product has a lot of very complex features, but after watching some early users, I realized that people were struggling to figure out some of the most basic things - even just adding and removing fields. I had made the 'delete' icon only show when you hovered over the field in the sidebar, but I made it more obvious by always showing it when the field was selected. I also added another 'Delete' link to the field option in the right sidebar. And then I also added a welcome modal that explain how to add and delete fields with animated GIFs. (Including the "delete" and "backspace" keyboard shortcuts.) Now that there's 3 separate ways to delete fields, people figure it out almost immediately.
Even adding fields was hard to get right. My initial version just had click-and-drag, so you had to first click, then drag to adjust the field width. I saw that new customers were just clicking on the page, and nothing would happen. So I added support for single clicks as well, and now it adds a field at that position with a default width.
It's scary that I might not have realized these UX problems if I wasn't paying attention.
> Nowadays it’s easy to get amazing stock templates for less than $50 instead of spending thousands on a custom design.
I strongly recommend https://pixelarity.com. I've used 3 of their templates now, and I think they're very good. Some of them even have jekyll versions that you can download. http://unsplash.com is incredible for stock photos, and I have a subscription to https://thenounproject.com for vector icons. There are a lot of free icons out there, but the Noun Project has a ton of variety, and lots of things you can't find anywhere else.
> When doing the development yourself, it is easy to slip into a false productivity when you increase the amount of code without achieving your business goals. The most infamous examples are building tools instead of a product or overthinking a complicated architecture "for the future."
This is really tough, but I'm actively trying to avoid this. Not just the fun tools and side-projects you want to build, but even some feature requests from customers. Certain might end up taking weeks or months, and they'll over-complicate your product, or they just won't be a good investment of your time.
> New and trendy technology usually means bugs, breaking changes, immature tooling and lack of documentation. "Boring" mature tech will allow you to achieve the same goals much faster and make it easy to find developers for hire.
I used Rails and React, since I'm very familiar and productive with those. I was tempted to try Elixir, but I think it would have taken me so much longer to build an MVP. I have a friend who started building their startup with Elixir, but switched back to Rails for the better productivity.
> Depending on the country, your experience with these business aspects can range from mildly unpleasant to the absolute worst.
I've almost finished setting up my company with Stripe Atlas, and I can say that it has been the absolute best experience. I can't recommend it strongly enough. I'm going through the post-incorporation stuff now with UpCounsel, and everything is just so easy.
Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#49Founder here. That list is a lot of cart before a horse. You could master all those points and still not have a company on your hands. #1: Solve an important enough pain point that companies or consumers will pay you for it. Sorry it's not more catchy.
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Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#50> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…
Your advice is actually good for a slightly unexpected reason: most people can't really understand the difference between UI and UX. Even worse are those that don't get it that "UI design" is of itself completely different from "graphic design". So if you tell someone "UX is terribly important", 90% of the time they will focus on "UI design" or "graphic design" and miss the point entirely while wasting tons of resources.
You can have:
- products with horrible UIs and horrible graphic design, but awesome user experience (UXs) -- because they solve a problem perfectly while enabling a good workflow, or are extensible and adaptable to new unanticipated workflows
- products with horrible graphic design but great UIs -- if the user flow is intuitive and productive, the interface responsive and discoverable, it really doesn't matter how shit looks
- products with great UIs and awesome graphic design but horrible UX -- the UI may be both intuitive and awesomly designed and responsive... but if it enables wrong or sub-optimal workflows more than the right ones, nudging users towards bad mindsets/perspectives/workflows, it lowers everyone's productivity and sooner or later people will realize that they are dragged down or disabled by that product with the "great" UI
So yeah... if what I wrote above ain't obvious to you, then don't focus on UX, because you'll actually do it wrong anyway. Focus on the problem you solve, on the product you develop to solve it, and on selling the solution. If the UX is not extremely bad or you're not in a "fashion/fad" driven niche, it will probable be ok despite suboptimal UX if you do the rest right.