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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

#71

Post by andrepd »

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…

> Visually appealing, sure.

It's not even.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#72

Post by looperhacks »

kskjfjfkdkska wrote: post #60

> Common patterns—like password strength indicators—usually exist for good reasons. NIST does not recommend password strength indicators. Make sure the form is compatible with password managers. https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-4/sp800-63b.html#password

The page does not recommend them directly, but also doesn't discourage them. In fact, it requires "guidance", which IMO might as well be a strength indicator.

> Verifiers SHALL offer guidance to the subscriber to assist the user in choosing a strong password

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#73

Post by JoeyJoJoJr »

noduerme wrote: post #42
re-thc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yet everything remotely serious built with React has gotten worse and worse... and apparently the project managers who rely in it and the coders who are used to its obviously major flaws can't think their way out of the wet paper bag that it's become, and see clear to writing a component from scratch. REST, sockets, whatever; the issue isn't how you send data over the wire, push it pull it or when. The issue is: Is w…

What is it exactly about React specifically (as apposed to Vue, HTML) that makes it flawed from a design perspective? I used to design and develop with Flash (which I very much miss) and while it was amazing for things like games, digital signage, elearning, etc, there is no way I could develop in Flash the products with the kind of complexity/responsiveness/sophistication of the web apps I am building now. Designing with hot reloading and code, live, is by far the most powerful and iterative design workflow I have ever experienced. While an inexperienced front-end developer may limit their design possibilities by only reaching for existing components, a good front end developer should be able to create bespoke components that are fit for purpose and responsive with the flexibility to rearrange and iterate.

With all that said though, there is a HUGE gap that Flash left for highly bespoke and creative products that web tech doesn’t satisfy at all.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#74

Post by robertlagrant »

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 think this is a great point. I was consulting with a customer and their key goal in a complex system that had a time-sensitive user workflow was "minimise clicks".

I said to them that that makes sense, but saving 0.5s on a click every two hours is not as impactful as (insert example of a change that would speed up the workflow by 10 minutes every two hours).

And it's as you say: they come from the consumer world, where minimising clicks keeps customers involved. But it's not the only thing to consider.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#75

Post by dmje »

Like... sorry to be That Guy, but maybe just employ / have a team with the right people from the start?

If a designer had a tech startup with no engineers, we'd all be (rightly) sniffy about it.

Imagine this post the other way round: "Hey, designers, here's everything you need to know about engineering and devops and coding in ONE PAGE!". Think about the HN response to this - it'd go down like a ton of hot shit. And rightly so.

I used to work at an educational tech company and they would - without even breaking into a sweat - take one of their engineering team and put them in charge of marketing. Same rule applies - imagine it the other way round, a marketing person with no knowledge of engineering setting the strategy for engineering. (And yes, I know it happens, but when it does we all moan on about it, no...?!)

Long and short: a startup / product without a UX person or designer in it right from the start is likely to be a clusterfuck.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#76

Post by erinaceousjones »

kskjfjfkdkska wrote: post #60

> Common patterns—like password strength indicators—usually exist for good reasons. NIST does not recommend password strength indicators. Make sure the form is compatible with password managers. https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-4/sp800-63b.html#password

Reading through their guidance they don't really mention anything about password strength indicators being a good or bad idea. Sure, they list out a set of rules to verify passwords by and state no OTHER arbitrary rules should be included. But that doesn't prevent you from calculating password strength based on the rules they specify ie. minimum length and complexity.

But I get that "strength" is a poor metric. It shouldn't allow "weak" passwords. It should be binary - pass or fail.

The nicest thing about strength indicators - and I reckon this is why they are copied a lot - is that they are usually real-time feedback to the user with a nice red/orange/green invalid/weak/strong indicator that updates as the user types. The best ones even go as far as show you the list of rules your password is failing to meet, again updating as you type. Much much nicer than the server-side validation form submission loop imo.

So, remove the middle concept of "weak but allowed" passwords from the strength indicator widget, I think then you get good UX that meets NIST recommendations..?

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#77

Post by nextts »

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…

I think to me that would be the appeal of Vim. VSCode implicitly promises this with its plugin approach. Using Ctrl Shift P for years is the sort of thing I like. One less thing in my way.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#78

Post by nextts »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #69

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 comp…

5-10x? Are you sure?

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#79

Post by nextts »

noduerme wrote: post #50
karhuton wrote: post #47

Here’s some typical reasons why a startup can fail: 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…

My most successful client (a company I have ownership in, now) has another slot besides marketing, design and code. That is our point person for filtering, testing and verifying user experience issues. Putting a single point person in charge of that onslaught of emails, who fully understands the software, and having them run a full time bug reporting/feature request channel, I think, is indispensible. They advocate o…

Would you call that role "customer success"?

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#80

Post by nextts »

dmje wrote: post #75

Like... sorry to be That Guy, but maybe just employ / have a team with the right people from the start? If a designer had a tech startup with no engineers, we'd all be (rightly) sniffy about it. Imagine this post the other way round: "Hey, designers, here's everything you need to know about engineering and devops and coding in ONE PAGE!". Think about the HN response to this - it'd go down like a ton of hot shit. And…

An early startup starts with jack of all trades. If you needed the full team that even a $10m company would have you are probably not a typical early startup.

The reality is marketing is a skill most people can fudge because they have done it. They have gotten jobs, dates and haggled for a free beer before.

Programming is only something freaks do so the average marketer won't code. And if they do the average coding marketer won't make resilient 99% uptime code without subtle bugs.

Hate to circlejerk but man .... programming to produce robust, correct, reliable systems that do something useful is hard. Despite what the AI bros are hot taking on X these days.

Have you ever noticed that some tradespeople do their own books but bookkeepers won't come and fix your AC unit.

Anyway rant over :)

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