Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

To me, "UX" still feels like a relatively new term. In its modern incarnation it's not what I do, although by intent it's actually my career speciality. As a category now, it feels like a poor compromise between true design and true code/userflow. I believe the existing tools try to bridge a gap that has existed since the earliest days of web development between the designers and the code monkeys.

I'm fortunate as a solo coder to have a very tight feedback loop with my own graphic design, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I started writing code making text-based games as a kid in the 80s, then became obsessed with graphic design, went to art school, worked as a designer at a traditional ad agency which had no coders... and because of my code competency became the go-to person for making web. And later apps. So I still currently art direct designers and also write the majority of code for clients. This lets me understand the flow first and then unify the design in ways that aren't prefab or obvious, but ensure user safety and flow in a beautiful way.

I think the tools now (Figma, yes, but also the reliance on standard use cases of frameworks like React) are very limiting. They shoehorn both designers and coders into an uncomfortable middle ground that's not too different from the arguments that used to erupt between designers and the couple of devs at my ad agency in the 90s - we want it to look like THIS vs. Do you know how impossible that is? So everyone settles on a crappy solution instead of sitting down and thinking about how to make something new and better for the situation.

Honestly, Flash was so great because it allowed both sides of a team to use both sides of their brain at the same time, and cross-pollinate design with code in a way that seems hopelessly lost now, at least for normal business apps outside of game development.

There aren't so many cases where business-y or banking software needs to be beautiful, but it could at least be thought through. I look at my banks' apps and sites and slap my face at the obvious miscommunication and sheer carelessness that must have taken place between management, design, and code to produce these monstrosities.

But would I want to be on the open market, looking for new clients with my cross-disciplinary background as a "UX" person? No. What they need aren't UX people. They need art directors who can at least write some code, or (even more rare) coders who have formal design training.

A small related rant is that many large companies with a dedicated team that works on design system don't seem to actually care much about UX. It feels demoralizing because sometimes it feels like many people are just using UX to push some other agenda.

I myself made this complaint a few times. When I was using medical erp once then again using a banking system. Both you could navigate by typing a chain of commands that would register even if you typed faster than the screens would render in the terminal. Hell, in the banking one I completely automated my job by writing an excel macro and sendkey commands to the terminal, then I sold it to the bank for a small sum after I quit (they asked me how I accomplished so much after realizing 3 people couldn’t handle my workload)

1) it failed to communicate and market it’s product

2) it’s product didn’t fit the user’s needs

3) it’s technology strategy made development too expensive

4) it’s product technical quality was too low

5) it’s product did not look appealing to potential new users

Developers are responsible for 3 and 4, sales and marketing for 1 and finally designers for 2 and 5.

With competent developers you can start a startup and make sure 3 and 4 never come to pass, but lack of good product designer will eventually kill it.

Here I use the broader sense of user-centered designer, which includes:

- research

- testing

- prototyping

- validation

- UI/UX design

- visual design

- …

The first four being the most important for a product market fit.

This is especially important for B2B products, because there understanding the needs of the business and their processes is key to making sure the product fits the user’s day-to-day work but the businesses’ future needs as well.

It may not be common, but you can and should use extended UCD research methods on the customer business processes itself instead of relying on PMs and sales just asking customer’s what they want. (This is often called Business Design or Service Design around here.)

Thanks for the second rec, I'll give it a go