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

81–90 of 190 posts

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#81

Post by re-thc »

JoeyJoJoJr wrote: post #73
noduerme wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What is it exactly about React specifically (as apposed to Vue, HTML) that makes it flawed from a design perspective?

I'd say it's not React (not parent poster). I mean React might not be the best, but it's the least of the current problems.

React is the most widely used. You're bound to attract all sorts of people. Poor code is poor code. You'd hire React developers because it is the easiest to hire. It doesn't make it good or bad.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#82

Post by Ensorceled »

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

> Make sure the form is compatible with password managers.

The number of sites that go out of their way to prevent password managers, well any "paste" mechanisms, is still annoying but are becoming fewer.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#83

Post by Ensorceled »

nsxwolf wrote: post #11
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…

My favorite cargo cult thing today is that when you’re logged out you can’t find the login link anymore, just “Sign up”.

Especially when the signup form almost looks like a login form username and single password field ... then you get an error "An account with this email already exists" and STILL NO LOGIN LINK.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#84

Post by intrasight »

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…

> backward compatible to the Stone Age

Like Emacs. And myself ;)

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#85

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

nextts wrote: post #78
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?

I might be exaggerating, but I know how much I and my coder friends earn.

Western companies hire much more engineers and adjacents than designers. Consequently, for designers, the income is much closer to a local median. As my perspective is one of a person currently living outside the US or western Europe, I see a huge disparity between pay grades.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#87

Post by mfld »

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…

> well, it's always in dark mode

So it's no TUI app that can accommodate changes to the terminal emulators color profile? I am a bit disappointed.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#88

Post by dchest »

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…

Speaking as someone who has never used it but has spent some time researching it, the Bloomberg Terminal constantly undergoes UI changes, though not in a dramatic way. It's obvious if you look at screenshots throughout the time (it even had some gradients!). It has had its own "rewrites in Svelte", transitioning from a custom renderer to HTML/JavaScript.

But you're correct - they don't mess with it, they slightly and mostly invisibly improve it, and someone who learned it in 80s could use it without problems today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqehwCWKVVw

https://www.bloomberg.com/ux/2017/11/10/relaunching-launchpa...

https://www.bloomberg.com/company/stories/how-bloomberg-term...

https://www.bloomberg.com/company/stories/designing-the-term...

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#89

Post by hnthrow90348765 »

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…

Make them learn coding instead of adding yet another responsibility onto developers.

Re: Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

#90

Post by whstl »

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…

Reading about whitespace on tables infuriates me so much.

At a previous job we had an actual good designer figure out what users wanted and she found out users wanted denser information. So she designed a more compact table. It was quite smart, used the whole screen, but still looked amazing and didn't feel cramped.

Then my company released it as a library for the whole company to use and the first thing one of the product managers did was requesting margins AND frames around it, plus a lot of whitespace between cells.

Now instead of displaying around 25 items on the screen at a given time, this other system can only display around 10.

The cherry on top: it looks horrible with the frame and with the unbalanced margins.

Post reply on HN