Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

tibinotes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 190 posts

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#61

Post by rich_sasha »

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…

One of the most expensive pieces of software around is a Bloomberg Terminal, with base price starting at 20k/yr/license, plus more for extra data. And the UI, when you first use it, is beyond clunky. It looks seriously like a piece of stone age technology, adapted from clay tablets. Even the styling is like 80s films about edgy hackers and their punch cards.

Except when you talk to the grey hairs, you realize that UI has never, ever changed - it is backwards compatible back to, well, stone age of computers. It is quirky, but once you learn it, you're done for life - no refreshed new looks or skins or dark modes (well, it's always in dark mode) or rewrites in Svelte or whatever. That's basically because the power user is essentially the only user that matters. They know all the arcane key bindings and weird abbreviations, and Bloomberg knows better than to mess with it.

I hated it at first but grew to love the stability of it.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#62

Post by seanwilson »

> If every product in your space does something the same way, there’s probably a good reason. If one company does something different, ask yourself: Is this intentional, or just a mistake?

To add to this, often you can come up with a lower friction UI idea for your specific use case (e.g. that requires less clicks) if you think hard about it, but if you stray too far from what people are used to seeing and interacting with it creates its own kind of friction, and you'll get feedback like "I found this unintuitive" or "it took me a moment to figure out how to use it". So you need to balance using familiar patterns vs new ideas.

E.g. maybe you think you can improve on the Amazon checkout experience for your own site, but by doing something different, you're tossing out the familiarity bonus you get for free. Similarly, by preferring checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns and text fields, over custom widgets, you get so much for free like user familiarity in reading the current state, and knowing how to change the state.

"Unintuitive" can often mean "I'm not used to this pattern" even if it might be a good pattern once people get used to it.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#63

Post by DidYaWipe »

conductr wrote: post #45
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…

At all times, people that are proficient at a green screen terminal application will prefer it to a web based or GUI based experience. They have muscle memory and a lot of codes memorized to switch back and forth from screen to screen extremely fast and exactly how many tabs to hit to fill out a form. It has nothing to do with SPA or whatever is currently new and flashy this has been going on for decades. The fact th…

That's funny. I automated a lot of my tech-writing job in the '90s with expansive macros written in WordBasic. What a great product.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#64

Post by DidYaWipe »

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…

And controls were demarcated as controls, not disguised as plan text or a decoration. You could tell if a function was activated by looking at the outline of the button; if the "bevel" shadowing went inward, the button was depressed and the function was on.

"Flat" design is simply derelict design. Fortunately there has been some backlash and we might be returning to legitimate GUIs.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#65

Post by eviks »

rich_sasha wrote: post #61
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…

One of the most expensive pieces of software around is a Bloomberg Terminal, with base price starting at 20k/yr/license, plus more for extra data. And the UI, when you first use it, is beyond clunky. It looks seriously like a piece of stone age technology, adapted from clay tablets. Even the styling is like 80s films about edgy hackers and their punch cards. Except when you talk to the grey hairs, you realize that UI…

> you realize that UI has never, ever changed - it is backwards compatible back to, well, stone age of computers. It is quirky, but once you learn it, you're done for life

True power users could customize to remove the quirks and also be set for life, but at a better level of ergonomics. Or they could even use the best customization from one of those gray beards who cared about ergonomics more ever back in the day

And none of of the cheap criticisms of skins would change it since skins for power users are optional

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#66

Post by arkh »

conductr wrote: post #45
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…

At all times, people that are proficient at a green screen terminal application will prefer it to a web based or GUI based experience. They have muscle memory and a lot of codes memorized to switch back and forth from screen to screen extremely fast and exactly how many tabs to hit to fill out a form. It has nothing to do with SPA or whatever is currently new and flashy this has been going on for decades. The fact th…

> 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.

Nowadays even the login screen in Windows can not manage it anymore. Gotta wait for some animation and whatever it needs coming back from sleep mode before it starts registering keys.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#67

Post by arkh »

hliyan wrote: post #35
998244353 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You forgot one awesome feature of those SPA: once your user finally manage to get some muscle memory in, you can push a new UI redesign so get them back to square one. Because you have to give work to do to your frontend people.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#68

Post by seanwilson »

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…

> To me, peak usability was 25 years ago, when most applications had a toolbar and a menu that followed a standard pattern.

Some things were good, but there were lots of problems too like features hidden behind right-clicks, not knowing if you had to double or single click, being required to read help/manuals to find features, too much jargon and technical language, and overuse of modals.

UIs have got incrementally better in lots of ways that really add up that I don't see people mention e.g. right-clicking and double-clicking is avoided, help is integrated into the UI where you need it, inline editing vs modals, options to edit an object appear next to it (locality) rather than you having to hunt in a menu, less technical jargon where appropriate, better onboarding, better undo/redo/autosave (which avoids clunky confirmation modals).

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#69

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

If you're not hiring a designer, someone else ends up doing their job instead. Someone, whose pay is probably 5-10x higher.

You don't even need them on the team permanently, commission a design or a review of the existing one.

Perhaps I'm biased. Graphic designers are dirt cheap. From our perspective, UX crowd is full of underqualified people looking for easy tech money. I can see how it can make hiring far more complicated.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#70

Post by squeedles »

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…

Exactly the reason I still write most of my code in emacs. I’ll use visual studio when I need to do GUI work, but I feel like I’m at a casino with a thousand flashing lights all vying for my attention. I also find swapping back and forth between keyboard and mouse to be a slowdown. I know some of the VS keyboard shortcuts but find many of them to be more convoluted than emacs (and I won’t even comment on the VS faux emacs bindings!)

Luckily I spend a lot of time building libraries, where I can keep my hands on the keyboard and focus on the problems I am trying to solve

Post reply on HN